Trimble Financials — Validation for Launch

Overview

Trimble Financials is an AI-enabled job costing and financial management platform built for small contractors — the kind of crews juggling field work and bookkeeping at the same time. The product promises real-time financial visibility so contractors can spend more time building and less time chasing numbers. As a UX Design Intern, I owned the validation work that helped the team feel confident in the experience before it reached customers.

Problem

Small contractors typically run their finances in a patchwork of spreadsheets, paper, and disconnected accounting tools. That setup makes it hard to see project profitability in real time, and the team needed to know whether the new product's workflows actually fit the way contractors think about jobs, costs, and cash flow — or whether familiar accounting conventions would get in the way.

Approach

Validate the riskiest workflows at high fidelity, before code shipped.

The team had a strong product hypothesis and a development roadmap, but limited evidence that contractors would understand the new flows on first contact. Rather than test the live build, I designed a single high-fidelity validation prototype in Figma — at production fidelity, so testers could react to language, layout, and interaction patterns the same way they would in shipping software.

• Focused on the workflows the team felt were the most novel, the most likely to be misunderstood, or the most critical to launch.
• Designed at high fidelity so feedback would land on real interaction patterns rather than abstract structure.
• Bundled four connected workflows into one prototype so testers moved through them in a realistic, end-to-end sequence.

Usability Testing

Eight moderated usability sessions with target contractors.

I ran eight moderated usability tests with participants who matched the product's target audience. Sessions were recorded and transcribed so insights could be cross-referenced and shared with developers, designers, and PMs after synthesis.

Sample task scenarios

• Walk me through how you would set up a new job in this tool.
• Show me how you'd check whether a job is on or over budget.
• Tell me what you think this screen is asking you to do.

Prototype

One high-fidelity prototype, four core workflows.

I built a single comprehensive prototype that strung four workflows together so testers could move from one to the next without context switching. Together the workflows covered the experience touchpoints the team most wanted to validate before launch.

Impact

Insights translated into developer priorities ahead of launch.

The findings landed in the team's backlog as scoped, prioritized work — not vague feedback. Severity ratings made trade-off conversations easier, and tying each recommendation to a specific screen meant developers could act without re-interpreting research.

• Prioritized list of usability fixes ranked by severity and frequency.
• Recommendations mapped to specific prototype screens for fast handoff.
• Confidence going into launch that core workflows fit the way contractors actually work.

Reflection

Research only creates value when someone can act on it.

Owning validation for Trimble Financials taught me that the worth of research isn't the volume of findings — it's whether they reach the people building the product in a form they can actually use. The hardest and most valuable part of the project wasn't moderating the sessions; it was turning eight conversations into a short, prioritized, screen-specific list that developers could pick up and act on without re-interpreting it.

It also reframed how I think about prototypes. Building at production fidelity wasn't about polish for its own sake — it was what let testers react to real language and real interactions, so the feedback landed on the product as it would actually ship rather than on an abstraction.