Kashflow tinkers with the user interface: an exclusive peek

I’ve known for some time that Kashflow is refactoring its user interface. Both Duane Jackson, CEO Kashflow and I agree that in its current iteration it is out of date and by making changes, he hopes this will encourage more people to come on board. User interfaces are always the subject of much angst among developers and can easily upset customers. UI is also subjective: what’s good for one isn’t necessarily good for another. The trick comes in striking a balance that most customers will accept and which continues to get the job done in as few clicks as possible.

Over the weekend Duane sent me some representative screen shots to give an idea where they’re going. The main changes are to the positioning and style of navigation areas:

In this screenshot you can see that Kashflow has introduced ‘breadcrumb’ navigation which will make spinning around different parts of the system a lot faster

Again, we have a tabbed layout but with cleaner buttons. Compare with the previous interface:

Finally we have the new co-branded front screen

And for comparis0n

In an email conversation, Duane said that existing customers will be given the option to switch the new navigation on. If they don’t like it then they can revert to the old. This followed some negative feedback on changes they made as part of the preparation during which they found that some users didn’t wish to change. New users will get the new navigation by default. That’s a smart move. Changes in navigation layouts are among the hardest to please everyone and the most easily confusing. I make no comment on the new layout except to say that I would have liked to see Kashflow give its pink/blue logo a makeover. I think they missed an opportunity to change the logo such that it would give a cleaner initial view and something of an ‘Oh, that’s better’ feel.

In the same conversation, Kashflow updated me on some other issues: “We don’t resell any of the integrated third-part applications. There’s opportunity to, sure, but I’d rather not for a number of reasons. Let say we resell Capsule CRM, it would discourage other CRMs that we don’t resell from integrating with us. Plus I’d much rather own the IP to everything we sell to end users. I think there’s more value in that approach for the company from a commercial perspective. It also means we have complete control over the code that we’re selling which I think is important.

Manage Subscription: besides just KashFlow users can pay for our PayPal Importer service (Either weekly or hourly). There are no other modules yet, but there will be very soon.

The new UI is expected to ship around mid-September once the beta testing period is concluded. As it stands, the only likely changes will arise out of bug fixes rather than fundamental design issues.

But what do you think? Are the changes radical enough? Does the cleaner interface appeal?

Tagged as: Accounting, Business, Duane Jackson, KashFlow, London, PayPal, Software as a service, User interface