Manufacturing & Assemblies for QuickBooks
TLDR:
Through an end-to-end design process from research to interaction design iterations to testing, I jumped into the QuickBooks Manufacturing space, and I teamed up with my triad of Product and Development to create a viable go-to-market design and experience that would serve as Intuit’s first foray into serving our manufacturing clients better and also open up the mid-market segment even more for QuickBooks.
The End Product
The alpha for QuickBooks Manufacturing which serves the emerging mid-market and mid-market businesses.
My Role
Product Designer
The Problem-Opportunity
Intuit’s goal was to target mid-market and emerging mid-market manufacturing businesses in the U.S. and at the same time better support existing manufacturing customers already using QuickBooks by creating a light Materials Requirements Planning (MRP) application integrated into other QuickBooks features.
Team
Product, Design, and Dev Triad
Time Spent
4-5 months
1. Pre-history and Context
The team initially had a designer—a distinguised peer of mine—but he was moved quickly to other projects. I came in to hit the ground running months later to fill in the gap, consume research, do rapid iterations, and jump quickly from low-fi to hi-fi and unblock and enable my product development team to tackle implementation.
I began the project with user research and market research. I partnered and aligned closely with my Product Manager, picked up existing qualitative and quantitative data, user research, and competitor research. I also confirmed the manufacturing space’s taxonomy—i.e. content and language design confirming manufacturing-specific vocabulary bolstered the final product design’s viability with the specific customer and industry that we were targeting.
2. Competitor Research and Feature ideation
Apart from the task of collaborating with my Product and Development partners, I knew that QuickBooks would be competing with dedicated manufacturing software companies. Competitors gave me a lot of industry knowledge and a wealth of ideas I could iterate on regarding the most common customer “jobs to be done”, especially the key workflows that should be hard requirements.
Rather than seeking pure product parity, the initial philosophy I arrived at and later confirmed was to produce the simplest and viable workflow. So I worked with the team to extract what key features and workflows truly needed to be fleshed out for a viable GTM offering.
3. Interaction Design and Rapid Iteration Phase
The bulk of my time was spent iterating on ideas and making sure everything would be consistent with the rest of the QuickBooks suite of products and the design system. At times, it was necessary to introduce newer patterns and I negotiated these patterns with the Intuit Design System team.
Iterating workflows to their ideal state also required more customer conversations and testing, a lot of collaboration with other QuickBooks groups (For example, similar to businesses like retail and construction, manufacturing is heavily-reliant on Inventory Management).
4. High-fidelity to Ready-for-Dev
I speedily layered user needs, workflows, and other findings and hypotheses into high-fidelity screens and prototypes.
The speed of execution here was as important as the confidence and quality of the final design and workflows, as Development had been blocked for months before I joined the team as Product Designer.
It’s worth noting that most high-fidelity work that I produced were either self-contained prototypes of flows or prototype-ready for the complete workflow that I tested with users in the final stage. .
5. Testing and Future State
I created a full workflow Figma prototype that became the basis for both moderated and unmoderated user testing sessions—the results of which served to bolster confidence in our initial release while also determining the next round of feature sets.
Aside from laying down the groundwork for future iterations, I wanted to mention that the tests were flawless with testers who had a manufacturing background (19 out of 19 tasks done easily and perfectly) while also scoring high among non-manufacturing-type testers (17/19).