02 | CASE STUDY (2020)

Connecting the ecosystem from a platform perspective

I led a variety of initiatives and platform capabilities such as Authentication, Mergers and Acquisitions, Identity Proofing and Financial Identity. This use case will review the redesign and rebuild of the Account Management experience for all Intuit products.


 
 

Overview

After the Intuit rebrand, the company began to connect the ecosystem and prioritize multi-product customers. However, it was extremely difficult for Intuit customers to access and manage their Intuit account and data because each product had bespoke methods and access points. This caused users to make mistakes and sometimes call for help.
WEB
Every product had a different navigation with different access points.
NATIVE
And in many instances, there was NO experience in our Native apps.

This decentralized strategy resulted in over 3M support calls every year (roughly ~$44M).

This is 3.5x more, for customers that can’t sign in and just give up.
INTUIT (HOSTED)
This is the default design. Customers can access this experience through account management links in Auth experiences.
TURBOTAX (WIDGET)
Widgets can be embedded into product experiences. For TurboTax customers, they access this through a link in the bottom left nav rail.
QUICKBOOKS (WIDGET)
Another instance of an embedded widget. However, this experience is difficult in the IA, and is not consistent with any other product.
MINT (API)
In rare instances, the product designed their own experience and relied on APIs rather than using the default widget.

I have spent over 12 hours trying to talk/chat/email with support about my email addresses, user names, and products I have that are associated with my email addresses, usernames and other identifying info. NO individual that I have interacted with that can discuss ALL the products I have or may have with Intuit. They ONLY can discuss the product that they are associated. Understanding that over the years I may have used several of the products.

So therefore, I have to guess which of the 15 products and services I have, connect with them via username and emails, and then ONLY discuss that ONE product...

Escalation email from a customer
July 2019
 

Provocations & Explorations

This design led initiative began in 2019 with a bold vision, while exploring new frameworks and system elements. Ironically, new laws and compliance regulations like GDPR and CCPA came into effect which helped us prioritize and govern these experiences for all Intuit products.
PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE
The Identity monolith not flexible for future growth
 
NEW VISION
Create a bold target state vision to set forth a new strategy
TARGET STATE
Iterated to find cohesion and balance with product UX
 

MVP Design

Towards the end of our design phase, the Intuit Design System completed the new product shell. We applied those new elements and scaled back our target state design to test against baseline. In addition to these iterations, we also contributed the One Intuit Account Access experience back to IDS.
The One Intuit Account Manager (OIAM) was the first adopter of many IDS components and is built entirely on App Fabric (which was new at the time). Both quantitative and qualitative testing was leveraged to back our design rationale.
 
One Intuit Account Access (OIAA) was created to deliver a cohesive experience for all customers in all products.
 

Scalable Frameworks

Before this initiative, it was slow and difficult to build new experiences based on the monolithic framework and our centralized identity model. Therefore, we transformer this capability into a contribution platform while adopting a hub & spoke framework. This enabled any team to contribute an experience and achieve their individual business goals.
 
HUB
The home page is the starting point for all experiences.
CATEGORY PAGE
First instance where customers can see a specific experience. Usually a read only view of a plugin.
SPOKE
All contributions can have a unique page where their widget is embedded.

The initial redesign drove an 18% increase in engagement in TurboTax & Quickbooks, and a 5% directional decrease in contacts in QBO.

 

21M

Annual visits

32.7%

CTA engagement
(was 12%)

66%

CTA conversion
(was 48%)

0.74

Task completion
(per session)
 

Enhancements Over Time

The new design successfully launched in July 2020. Since then, Identity and several other teams have enhanced the overall experience to solve many customer problems. During this time my role evolved too, shifting away from individual contributor and towards manager.

Post MVP

Here is a short list of Identity experiences that were implemented post MVP with only one developer allocated to this domain.

  • Updates to IA to extend our contributions
  • Next Best Action model using ML to help customers find what they need.
  • Qualtrics survey to ask customers what they like and don’t like and measure NPS
  • Added popular actions for direct link to spokes that drive the most business impact
  • Created and added product and account switching to provide access across the ecosystem
  • Added product suggestions for market awareness without it being an advertising portal
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