This is the first post in a two-part series designed to give you more insight into why we did this, how we conducted our research and how that research shaped the direction we’re taking.
By “navigation” we mean how our pages and functionality are organised into a clear, understandable hierarchy that accountants can move through intuitively. It touches every part of Silverfin. It affects how people find work, move between clients, review files, complete tasks, and understand where they are in the product.
Over time, as Silverfin has grown, the platform has become more powerful. We’ve added more workflows, more features, and more ways for firms to shape the product around their processes. That flexibility is one of Silverfin’s strengths, but it also becomes challenging to weave all this powerful functionality together in a way that is intuitive for new users but has everything in reach for experienced users.
One of our core product objectives is to reduce the overall time to compliance — that is, the time it takes from starting a job all the way to final submission. To that end, we’re focused on automating all the manual tasks and busy work we can. For those tasks and actions that can’t be automated, we still want to make them as frictionless as possible.
We knew from feedback that there was an opportunity for improvement in this area.
However, without thorough research and careful execution, making sweeping changes to our core structure could be disruptive to the established habits of long term Silverfin users.
In this blog post I’ll dive into how we combined research from support feedback, session recordings, usage data and other channels to evolve our platform through evidence based decision making.
“Our users spend most of their working day in Silverfin. That’s a responsibility. Changes to something so central to people’s work need to be handled with care.” – Martin Lysholt Nielsen, VP of Product
Starting from what we already knew
We already had a large amount of passive feedback from various sources, including support conversations, customer success insights, surveys, user interviews, and other day-to-day conversations with firms.
We analysed thousands of data points across all these channels to create themes around the most acute pain points, unmet needs and desires of our user base. These structured “opportunities” help us stay focused on where we can have real impact on the user experience.
We combine this with usage data which shows us the pages that are most used, where users click and how they move through the platform from task to task.
Mapping the problem space is a fundamental step that each of our Silverfin product teams goes through when undertaking product improvements. Understanding exactly which problems we want to solve helps ensure design decisions are well informed and backed by evidence.
Understanding how users move through Silverfin today
The core of Silverfin is the compliance work itself. This is orchestrated through our working screen, reconciliations, and account templates. It’s where data is reconciled, annual accounts are curated, and corporation tax is calculated.
Our data shows this is where users spend over 70% of their time, so it’s a key area where we can reduce the overall time to compliance in our platform. It’s where we are already simultaneously exploring how agentic AI can automate existing manual work.
It’s also where our feedback analysis surfaced some of the key navigation pain points.
It’s not just the manual work that takes up time. Navigating between all these screens involves a lot of back and forth, clicking, scrolling and searching. This adds up significantly over the course of an accountants day.
Not only that, but the functionality surrounding compliance work, such as document management, communications, and exports, was adding to the disruption. Any journey to these supporting pages would pull an accountant away from the compliance work, with no quick way back. In session recordings, we saw users restart their journey from the top of the file each time, then try to find their way back to where they had been working. This added to the clicking, searching, and page switching.
Another clear signal was how accountants set up their browser tabs. Across hundreds of session recordings, we observed accountants opening large numbers of tabs in order to work efficiently in Silverfin. This showed us which pages accountants wanted at their fingertips, and where the existing navigation was letting them down.
Users might start a session by opening their working screen, communications, adjustments, and the reconciliations they wanted to work on, each in a separate tab. They were manually creating the navigation they needed because our existing menu structure wasn’t reflecting the way they wanted to work.
These are examples of how we analysed what accountants were doing in the platform today. But this was only half the picture. It told us what users were doing; to understand why, we needed to move into more active research.
“The future of compliance work is not just about adding AI on top of existing workflows. It is about rethinking how accountants move through the product, where automation can help, and where the interface needs to give users clearer context and control.” – Nick Meerlaen, Head of Product
Moving into active research
Quantitative data can tell us a lot about what our users are doing. But understanding “why” comes from qualitative insights — from actually talking to accountants.
We conducted interviews with dozens of accounting firms, where accountants shared their screens and showed us exactly how and why they work the way they do in Silverfin. We could see first hand where they face challenges and dig deeper to ask them for more details. In some cases, we also visited offices to sit with users directly and observe their work.
This helped us answer questions we could only guess at from the data. For example, we’d previously tried to improve workflow navigation by introducing the workflow navigation side panel. However, the data showed adoption of this functionality was very low.
Why?
One of the insights we took from our interviews was that accountants rely on key information, such as reconciliation status, starring, and account balances, to decide where to navigate next.
That information is only shown on the working screen, and was missing from the existing workflow navigation. As a result, accountants stuck to their existing habits, despite a seemingly quicker navigation option being available.
This is one example of how we linked quantitative and qualitative data together to give us a deep understanding of the problem. We took this approach across all the identified opportunities, ensuring we challenged the assumptions we had around any particular observation.
The conclusions we took forward
Our research showed that Silverfin’s existing navigation structure wasn’t naturally complimenting the way accountants wanted to complete their compliance work.
When accountants have to stop and think where something is, lose context between areas, or miss key actions because they’re hidden, the navigation is working against them.
It was making it harder for new users to learn Silverfin, and making it less efficient for experienced users to move around their work and complete tasks.
This research gave us the foundation for the next phase: exploring how the navigation could change.
In part two, we’ll look at how we moved from research conclusions into solution discovery. We’ll cover how we generated and tested ideas, how we weighed trade-offs, what assumptions we needed to validate, and how user feedback shaped the direction of the redesign.
