Developer dashboard

Giving app makers analytics

The Xero App Store offers a wide range of third-party applications that integrate seamlessly with Xero. From generative interviews, we knew that the lowest point in a Xero app maker’s emotional journey is when it comes time to grow their app and bring in more customers. By surfacing app data in the developer portal, an app partner can see how customers are moving through the conversion funnel and understand more about the customers they get from Xero. This helps with decision-making around go-to-market activity, app positioning, and where to invest for growth.

As the product designer on this project, I owned the process end to end: experimenting and working fast and loose, synthesising research findings, engaging and co-designing with app partners, building out Figma components, testing against real data extremes, mapping flows, prototyping, gathering feedback, running user testing, documenting decisions, and looping back to refine the work as I learned more.

Made at Xero

Maarten Idema

022 697 1672

LinkedIn

Emotional journey
Customer emotion journey map
Metrics exploration
Exploration – details obscured for confidentiality
Metrics prototype
User testing flow
Dashboard widget showing: app listing views, leads generated, connected, and disconnected.
Dashboard widget showing the number of connections and disconnections made in the last 6 months
Dashboard widgets for "Days connected" and how many days it takes apps to disconnected.
Dashboard widget showing the Referral breakdown
Table showing the health of the app
App health table

Before this dashboard, app partners were operating in the dark — dependent on Xero for even basic visibility into their own business. The dashboard replaced that dependency with self-sufficiency – whether that’s understanding where growth is coming from, or catching a spike in disconnections.

Much of what the dashboard surfaces didn’t exist for app partners before – this wasn’t a better interface for data they already had, it was visibility that hadn’t existed at all. The design challenge was making genuinely new information legible to people who are product builders, not data analysts: surfacing the right signal at the right moment, clearly enough that a partner can open the dashboard, see what's happening in their business, and know what to do next.

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