Adsum

Adsum provides accountants and businesses with innovative tools to streamline VAT, PAYE, and corporation tax management—spending less time on busywork and more time driving growth.

Challenge

Adsum, a successful UK FinTech startup, needed specialist UX design help to completely redesign their digital product. The challenge was taking complex FinTech functionality and making it ultra-simple for accountants and business owners to understand their business finances quickly and clearly. Beyond the core platform redesign, Adsum needed a scalable foundation that could support multiple products layered on top—including integrations with Xero and QuickBooks.

Impact

We redesigned Adsum's core SaaS platform in just two 5-day UX Sprints (10 days total). The scalable design system we created still forms the bedrock of Adsum's platform today. Since the initial engagement, we've designed multiple additional products including Instant VAT, specialist accountancy tools, corporation tax features, and partnership integrations with Xero and QuickBooks—all building seamlessly on that original foundation. The modular design approach allowed Adsum to continuously expand their offering without requiring platform-wide redesigns.

How we helped

User research
Market Research
Wireframing - Low-fidelity, high-fidelity
UX design
Design system
Prototyping
User testing

Approach

Pre-flight

We had a two hour meeting the week before the sprint to meet the team, discuss the project brief, walkthrough the current registration and onboarding process, confirm the deliverables and obtain any necessary assets before the first day of the sprint.

Daily calls

Every morning we had a 15 minute stand up with the Adsum team

Show & Tell

At the end of each day we sent an email with a link to a prototype plus a video screencast of us presenting our work to the Adsum team

Prototyping

Prototypes not presentations - we prefer to show prototypes instead of screens. This allowed the Adsum team to walk through user journeys instead of a set of static screens.

Handover

We performed three rounds of user testing which were all recorded. The video recordings, feedback and results all made available to the Adsum team, and written up into a user testing report.