INTUIT - QuickBooks
"Features. Findable. Finally."
"QuickBooks' most valuable customers — Gold and Platinum tier merchants — were paying for features they didn't know existed. I was brought in to fix that."
THE BRIEF
In August 2025, I joined Intuit QuickBooks on a 3-month contract as a Product Designer, embedded directly within the payments and financial management product team.My focus was specific: the Gold and Platinum tier merchant experience.These are QuickBooks' highest-value customers — established businesses, finance teams, and operations managers running complex financial workflows across invoicing, payroll, banking, expenses, reporting, and customer management every single day.They weren't getting a product that matched what they were paying for.My job was to change that.
THE RESEARCH — HOW I IDENTIFIED THE REAL PROBLEMS
I didn't assume. I investigated.
DISCOVER Walked into a live product I hadn't touched before, with weeks rather than years to find where the real friction lived — running usability sessions, digging through support tickets, and talking to account managers who already knew where merchants got stuck.
DEFINE The obvious brief was "add more features." The evidence said otherwise — merchants weren't short on capability, they were blind to what they already had. I reframed the problem around discoverability, not feature count.
DESIGN Designed fixes to sit inside an existing, live product rather than a system I'd get to own long-term — contextual prompts, one-click actions, and a tier dashboard built to slot into QuickBooks' current architecture, not replace it.
DELIVER Packaged every finding into a roadmap a team I was about to leave could act on without me in the room — prioritised, evidenced, and handed off rather than requiring my continued presence to execute.
The Situation
Six months, embedded inside someone else's product team — and QuickBooks' highest-value customers were paying for a subscription tier whose best features they didn't even know they had.
The Constraint
I didn't have years to build a system here. I had weeks to find the highest-leverage fix, build the commercial case for it, and hand it to a team that would keep going long after I left.
The Outcome
Turned a discoverability problem into a revenue argument — 40+ evidenced gaps, one prioritised roadmap, adopted by a team I'd only just joined.
Three critical problems emerged from my research:
Problem 1 — Features they paid for were invisible. This was the most commercially damaging finding of the entire engagement.Gold and Platinum tier customers were describing features already included in their subscription as "something I'd need to pay extra for."Merchants were paying for capabilities they didn't know they had. Not because the features didn't exist — they did. But because the interface never surfaced them at the right moment, in the right context, for the right user.The result: underutilised subscriptions, frustrated merchants, and support calls that should never have happened.
Problem 2 — Daily tasks took too long
High-frequency workflows that Gold and Platinum merchants performed every single day were designed for occasional users, not power users.
Approving a batch of invoices required opening each one individually. Generating a standard monthly report required full manual configuration every time. Finding a customer's complete payment history meant navigating across three separate modules.
For a finance manager processing 50+ invoices a day, these weren't minor inconveniences. They were hours of lost productivity every week.
Problem 3 — No experience difference between tiers
A Gold tier merchant paying for a premium subscription experienced the same interface as a basic plan user. There was nothing in the product that reflected the value of their investment or made their daily workflow feel premium.
This created a quiet but dangerous problem: if the product doesn't feel different, the tier doesn't feel worth it.
Runs daily financial operations for a mid-to-large business. Processes invoices, manages payroll, reconciles bank accounts, and generates reports for the board. Uses QuickBooks for 4–6 hours every day. Every extra click is a real cost.
Their definition of success: "I got through my entire morning financial workflow without thinking about the software once."
Oversees financial performance at a strategic level. Needs clear, fast visibility into cash flow, outstanding payments, and key metrics. Dips in and out of QuickBooks throughout the day. Needs answers fast — not navigation exercises.
Their definition of success: "I opened QuickBooks, saw exactly what I needed, made a decision, and moved on."
PERSONA- WHO I WAS DESIGNING FOR
Two distinct merchant types within the Gold and Platinum tier
What I did:
Moderated usability testing — Observed Gold and Platinum tier merchants completing real tasks across all six modules. Timed task completion. Noted every moment of hesitation, confusion, or workaround behaviour.
Stakeholder interviews — Spoke with QuickBooks account managers and support teams who had direct visibility into what Gold and Platinum merchants complained about most. They knew exactly where the friction lived.
Support ticket analysis — Reviewed the patterns in customer support requests from Gold and Platinum accounts. The highest-frequency tickets pointed directly to the feature discoverability failure and the invoice approval workflow.
Heuristic evaluation — Systematic audit of all six modules against established usability principles, with every violation scored by severity, frequency, and retention risk.
Analytics review — Usage data showing which features Gold and Platinum merchants were and weren't using — and the gap between what they had access to and what they actually activated.
The finding that changed everything
The support ticket analysis and usability testing told the same story from two different directions. Merchants weren't calling support because things were broken. They were calling because they couldn't find what they needed — and often, what they needed was already there.
THE DESIGN — WHAT I PROPSED
The most impactful change I designed was also the most conceptually simple: surface the right features to the right merchants at the right moment.
Instead of burying Gold and Platinum capabilities in settings menus and help documentation, I designed a contextual prompt system — intelligent nudges that appear inline, at the exact moment a merchant would benefit from a feature they haven't activated yet.
A Gold merchant generating their third manual report this week sees a prompt: "You can save this as a template and generate it in one click. Set it up now →"
A Platinum merchant approving invoices one by one sees: "You have bulk approval available on your plan. Approve all in one step →"The feature was always there. Now it's findable — in context, without a support call.
ENTERPRISE GOLD
ENTERPRISE PLATINUM
Designing for Intuit Assist
During my engagement, Intuit was actively rolling out Intuit Assist — its AI agent platform embedded directly into QuickBooks. Rather than designing around it, I designed with it in mind.The contextual feature discovery prompts I designed for Gold and Platinum merchants were built to complement Intuit Assist's intelligence layer — surfacing the right capability at the right moment, whether triggered by the user's behaviour or by an AI agent identifying an opportunity.
The one-click invoice approvals aligned directly with the Payments Agent's automation model. The consolidated dashboard I designed created the visual foundation for the Finance Agent's daily summaries and anomaly flags to surface within.
The Gold and Platinum tier experience I designed wasn't just a better interface. It was a better canvas for Intuit Assist to do its most valuable work — for the merchants who needed it most.
One-Click Invoice Approvals
For Gold and Platinum merchants processing high invoice volumes, I redesigned the approval workflow from the ground up.Before: Select invoice → Open → Review → Approve → Return to list → Repeat × 50After: Select all → Review summary → Approve all → Done
A task that took 15+ steps now takes 4. For a finance manager approving 50 invoices every morning, this is hours returned to their week — every week.
When a merchant's customer calls to query a payment, the account manager needs their complete financial picture immediately — invoices, payments, outstanding balance, payment history — without navigating across three modules while the customer waits.I designed a unified customer financial panel: a single view that surfaces everything relevant to that customer relationship in one place, accessible in one click from the customer record.
Consolidated Tier Dashboard
THE INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE — BEFORE AND AFTER
Two workflows completely restructured:Invoice Approval — Old path:Invoice List → Individual invoice → Approval screen → Confirm → Back to list → RepeatInvoice Approval
New path:Invoice List → Select batch → One-click approve → Confirmation → Done
THE ROADMAP
All 20+ findings were organised into a prioritised product roadmap across three delivery horizons and presented to QuickBooks product leadership:
Now — Critical experience failuresFeature discoverability, bulk invoice approvals, unified customer view. Highest retention risk. Recommended for immediate sprint inclusion.
Next — Workflow efficiency layerReport templates, consolidated dashboard, cross-module navigation improvements. High-frequency friction for power users.
Later — Tier differentiation and AI layerPlatinum advanced forecasting, AI-assisted anomaly detection, personalised dashboard intelligence. The foundation for a genuinely premium tier experience.Every item in the roadmap came with a corresponding design — wireframes, flows, and high-fidelity mockups. Not abstract recommendations. Actionable designs ready for engineering handoff.
THE IMPACT
20+ experience gaps identified, evidenced, and designed against — adopted directly into the QuickBooks product roadmap.Feature discoverability failure surfaced and resolved — Gold and Platinum merchants can now find and activate the capabilities they're already paying for, without a support call.
Daily workflow efficiency significantly improved for high-volume merchants — invoice approvals, report generation, and customer management redesigned for power users, not occasional ones.Support call reduction built into every design decision — contextual prompts, smarter navigation, and unified views designed to answer questions before they become tickets.
Tier value made visible — Gold and Platinum merchants experience a product that reflects the value of their investment for the first time.
WHAT THIS ENGAGEMENT DEMONSTRATES
I design for the user who uses the product most, not the user who uses it least
Gold and Platinum merchants are power users. Every design decision I made was evaluated against their reality — high volume, high frequency, high stakes. Not the occasional user the original interface was built for.
I find the commercially significant insight, not just the usability issue
The feature discoverability finding — merchants paying for features they didn't know existed — isn't a UX finding. It's a revenue finding. Identifying it and elevating it to the top of the roadmap is the difference between a designer who improves interfaces and a designer who impacts the business.
I design systems, not screens.Contextual feature prompts, tier-aware components, report template architecture — these aren't one-off screen fixes. They're patterns that scale across every module, every tier, every merchant type.
I reduce support dependency by design
Every feature I built was evaluated against the question: does this eliminate a support call? That mindset — designing to reduce friction before it becomes a problem — is what separates proactive product design from reactive UI improvement.
CONCLUSION
QuickBooks' best customers deserved a better product.Not more features — a smarter, faster, more considered experiencethat recognised who they were and what they needed to do.That's what I designed.