QuickBooks Research
Understanding what it means for small business owners & QuickBooks users to manage and
make sense of their finances.
QuickBooks Online Research
Overview
My internship project was to conduct research on the financial journey of QuickBooks Online customers to help the team ensure we’re accurately solving the needs of thousands of customers who choose QB for their financial management needs. For the sake of privacy I can not share too many details about the learnings & impact from this research.
Company
Intuit
Duration
6 weeks (July - August ‘21)
Tools
Mural, Figma, Zoom, Respondent
Skills
UX Research, Co-Creation, Usability Testing, Diary Studies
Research Goal
The goal from this research project was to learn what it means for SMB’s to understand their business finances in QBO
Why does this research matter?
We want to improve the percentage of users where QBO fulfills its promise of “understand your business finances”.
This research will help us understand what we can change about the Quickbooks product to increase the number of customers that get to this payoff moment.
Process
To approach our research goals and questions, in collaboration with my cross-functional team we broke our research goal into two main research questions.
What roadblocks do SMBs face on their journey to financial clarity in QBO?
Which features/pieces of information are integral for customers to understand their business finances in QBO?
Methodology
We took a mixed-methods research approach to dive deeper into our research questions
In-depth Interviews & Usability Testing
Interviews with small business owners who recently signed up to better understand their business finances. Observational interviews with small business owners helps us learn about when customers have moments of increased financial understanding or run into usability roadblocks in QBO.
Diary Study
Following first time QBO users through their journey signing up & getting started with QBO. This will allow us to understand how SMBs use QBO in the first 3 weeks and what progression they make in their journey to financial understanding.
Key learnings
The main takeaways from research.
Having a complete and up-to-date understanding of their cash flow and expenses means having financial clarity.
The QuickBooks interface feels overwhelming at first and often times most features or pages go unused. This “noise” adds friction to their experience.
Customers struggle to feel confident that they’ve set up their QuickBooks correctly. This then leads to a future of uncertainty and difficulty trusting the numbers they see on the screen.
Illustrating Opportunity Areas with concept sketches
In collaboration with designers I developed sketches to visualize certain product recommendations, based off the insights and takeaways from research.
Concept Sketches: Tax Widget
Concept Sketches: Expense Breakdown
Business Outcomes
This research not only informed the product roadmap for teams working on relevant features but also served as a foundation for a org-wide initiative to test and ensure usability across QuickBooks products.
The insights directly influenced the redesign of key QuickBooks experiences, simplifying the user interface to surface essential information that was previously difficult to find. Additionally, the research insights led to improvements within the main menu, allowing users to personalize their experience by customizing the menu to display only the pages they regularly use, reducing information overload and making the platform more approachable.
Reflection
This was such an exciting space to be working in and I’m grateful for all the lessons I learned while conducting this research.
When to begin synthesis When working with large amounts of data across different research methods, it can become almost too much to review after all the data has been gathered. I learned to incorporate synthesis after the first couple of interviews and to continue synthesis sessions mid-way through the research collection process. This way we can start small and continue to analyze the data and build upon insights as the research continues.
Research Advocacy As this was my first internship with Intuit as a design researcher, a huge takeaway I’ve learned is that as a researcher, we have to put ourselves in different scenarios (e.g design reviews or product roadmap discussions) to ask how certain designs or product features are serving our customers. Being a research is being an advocate for the customer.