Intuit Link
Connecting pros and their clients on a secure network platform to enable data exchange and collaboration
*Winner of the Scott Cook Innovation Award - 2015
The Challenge
During tax season tax professionals spend about 60% of their time collecting and managing documents from their clients. Waiting for documents from customers can lead to wasted time and frustration and having multiple data retrieval methods leads to scattered client data. My team was tasked with solving this problem for our customers and their clients.
The Approach
Working within an agile team we were able to deliver the first round of code in about three months. We relied on the Lean Startup framework to build, test, and learn while delivering MVP's throughout the season. I initiated design sprints to work with the product management and engineering teams. We had a regular cadence of customer research and usability testing all in service to learning fast.
The Outcome
The resulting product, Intuit Link, helped reduce our customers’ cycle time by about 40% for tax preparation services. We are still on the journey to build, measure, and learn about how we can improve the product. In 2015 this product was awarded the Scott Cook Innovation award and continues to live on within the Intuit ecosystem.
Project Brief
How might we reduce the pain our customers feel around collecting and managing their clients' data
There is a saying that goes "The only two sure things in life are death and taxes." And every year a large portion of the population gears up for the tax season by gathering their documents including W-2's, 1099's, and various receipts that may be scattered all over their personal lives.
Now imagine you're a tax professional that needs to gather all of these documents - important and trivial. You then need to sort through these documents, determine what's relevant and not, rename, scan, copy, print, save, etc. You get the idea.
Now imagine all the different ways your clients want to deliver this data. In days past folks would bring a shoebox or filing cabinet into your office, or mail it to you if they were remote. Fast forward to the current myriad of delivery methods and you can see how quickly the pain compounds for our professionals.
We were tasked with solving this problem. Keep reading below to see how we accomplished this improved experience for our customers and in turn their taxpayer customers.
Mapping the Experience
Since Link was a new product I had to imagine the possibility of what could be. I led the team with understanding the current user journey through research with customers. After that, I mapped out what the current state was and what future state could be.
After we had an idea of the future state I was able to map out several flows that illustrated the symbiotic relationship between accountants and their customers.
From there I began sketching and wireframing and testing with customers.
Initial rough draft of the back and forth relationship with accountants and taxpayers.
Research
Discovery for this project included multiple research projects. Because the team was moving so fast a lot of the research ran in parallel to the development of the actual product. Balancing learning with producing was a learning process for both engineering and the design team. Eventually, we landed on a practice of doing design sprints that ran ahead of the developers to deliver assets ahead of time for the agile team.
I employed several kinds of research to fit the needs of the moment. We did fieldwork in customers offices, we brought customers into our usability lab, and we had several customers attend rapid prototyping sessions.
This product team is still learning about the product and our customers so the research continues but is more targeted and feature specific. In the coming tax season, the team will be focused on researching taxpayers (our pros customers) to deliver a delightful solution for the DIFM (do-it-for-me) segment of taxpayers.
Agile Delivery
The Lean Startup + Agile methodologies weighed heavily in how we ran this product team and the design team that worked on it. Embracing ambiguity and an experimentation mindset was uncomfortable at first, but I was quickly able to see the merit of learning and failing fast.
Lean experimentation was a huge part of the success of this product. We ran several experiments, gathered learnings, and pivoted or persevered based on what we learned. After running through several loops of experimentation we were able to deliver on some of our hypotheses and pivot as needed.
As we built new features and integrated with other Intuit Saas products we were able to remain lean and agile which led to Intuit Link’s success and adoption.
Design and Tech collaboration for an MVP feature
Successful Launch + Expansion
Intuit Link is still up and running! At last check a few years ago there were over 10K accountants and 160K taxpayers on the platform with plans to grow our global customers. I worked with the Canadian Intuit team to begin implementing Link into desktop products and they planned to integrate deeper into the QuickBooks environment to allow the same collaboration between accountants and their small businesses.You can learn more about the product on Intuit’s marketing page.
Click the image to view the marketing page for Intuit Link