Our new design language: delivering consistency and quality at scale across Xero

Xero Design Language (XDL) has won gold in the Digital Products category at the 2026 Best Design Awards, presented by the Designers Institute of New Zealand.

It comes a year after Xero received the Value of Design Black Pin, and it’s another proud moment for our Design team and the many collaborators who helped bring XDL to life.

XDL is the shared design foundation behind Xero’s products: the colours, typography, layouts and interaction patterns that shape how Xero looks and works. It’s what makes Xero feel familiar and easy to use wherever you are, including in our AI-powered experiences and integrations.

Judges noted XDL is an “ambitious piece of work” that’s “well integrated across the ecosystem, including AI agents … (and) has the potential to create meaningful impact for both businesses and the people using it.” 

And that impact is already showing up for customers. In early testing,  users spent 40% less time on payment tasks*. And early testing of banking tasks saw user satisfaction in relation to the new design language rise to 91% and perceived ease of use  in relation to XDL rose to 85%*.

The feedback behind those numbers is just as telling. As one small business owner in Australia told us during testing:

“It’s a much better layout. I love the fact that I can just update the codes and the description [in-line]. I don’t have to do anything else, I don’t have to open anything else, there’s a lot less clicks.”

Why we built XDL

Xero serves 5 million customers across 180 countries. And as our platform has grown to incorporate AI-powered capabilities, a robust ecosystem of connected apps and powerful integrations, so has the challenge of maintaining a product experience that feels connected across many different surfaces, workflows and financial jobs that our customers interact with on a daily basis.

With the breadth of financial operations Xero now helps customers manage, consistency isn’t just a nice to have, it’s key to building trust. It means delivering an experience customers are familiar with, that they recognise and can move through their workflows with ease. One that behaves predictably where the work happens. 

The question our Design team asked in early 2025 was: how do we build a quality user experience that spans our evolving operating system, creates the familiarity and consistency customers need, and keeps pace with Xero’s growth? 

The answer was XDL. Much more than a visual refresh, it’s an AI-ready design system for the next era of Xero. 

Designing at scale 

Built on Xero’s foundational design system, XDL sets the new standard for our product experiences. It connects brand, design, product and engineering, so every team building Xero works from the same source of truth.

It unifies existing products while scaling to support AI-powered workflows.

To address the velocity of Xero’s product and AI growth, we’ve embraced a full tokenised system for XDL. Properties like colour and typography are stored as tokens that flow directly from design into code. So when something needs to change, it changes once at the token level rather than being manually updated across thousands of instances.

Because design and code speak the same tokenised language, teams spend less time recreating patterns from scratch and more time iterating on what’s already there. That means improvements that customers ask for can reach them sooner. 

XDL also maps across all of Xero’s markets and integrations. Wherever you are, we’re delivering a consistent, high-quality experience that our customers expect.  

What it means for our customers

For our customers, XDL isn’t a name you need to remember. It’s the consistent experience that feels recognisable wherever you are in Xero, and financial information that is easier to read and act on. 

Accessibility has also been built into the foundations of XDL. Refined colour choices lift contrast so that anything designers build from these new colour palettes exceeds accessibility requirements. Typography has been updated too, with tabular numbers and aligned decimals bringing financial-data best practices into the product itself.

We’ve already begun rolling it out across Xero’s core products, the Xero Partner Hub and our mobile app. And XDL has powered the transformation of Xero’s home page and navigation, creating a refreshed and cohesive experience for customers.

But the more exciting signal is how XDL performs in agentic experiences like XeroForce, our new natural language custom AI agent builder, that leverages XDL foundations, and partner integrations with Claude and Microsoft 365 Copilot and ChatGPT. 

These have shown that components and workflows that historically took longer to update can now be uplifted quickly, because the infrastructure is already there. For example, XDL has enabled us to ship and adapt generative UI widgets through our partner integrations, and make updates and improvements to support additional use cases.

And as Xero expands into new products and AI-powered experiences, XDL is the foundation that will ensure it all feels like the Xero customers know and love.

* Based on two studies, each open for approximately three weeks: Payment Settings Study (January 2026, 86 participants across Australia and the US) and Banking Tasks Study (March 2026, 111 participants across Australia, the US and the UK). Both studies included accountants and bookkeepers (ABs) and small business owners (SBs), and both Xero and non-Xero users.