Intuit

Role: Sr. UX writer
The challenge: Small business owners needed a way to track everything for a project in one place in QuickBooks Online – invoices, receipts, payments in, payments received, and a way to invoice in installments. We created a new feature called “Projects” and a new style of invoicing both of which had to be able to scale globally.

We led our own global research sessions, following Intuit’s principle of moving quickly and failing fast.

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Special projects

GDPR

The challenge: Intuit was running out of time to get GDPR into effect by the legal deadline. And They didn’t have a dedicated UX team to work on the project.

I was pulled off my team and asked to take over & lead the design & writing for the GDPR site to ensure we hit the deadline set by European law. We had a very small team – a special projects design manager who managed the relationships, myself, and a remote designer.

In order to develop user flows from laws we had to approach this very differently.

Realizing that Americans often think (or don’t) about privacy very differently from the rest of the world, we focused on international research. We relied on the UK team to interpret our designs and pass along recordings and findings.

Considerations:
Most of our team was scattered around the world which added to the complexity. Only myself, my team lead and our Privacy counsel were based in Mountain view.

We had to develop this in tandem with Care who had no way to foresee what kind of impact GDPR would have on them.

So in addition to the website, I created all the communications that Care would be sending to customers. And all the training materials to help the Care team handle these complex flows and customer questions and concerns about their privacy.

We had to work very closely with Engineering who didn’t know if the code bases could do what we needed to do most of all, or risk getting fined (around) $22M per infraction – actually delete customers’s personally identifiable information. Intuit has a few products, including the original one – QuickBooks, on a legacy codebase.
(Fun fact – there are a ton of QB customers who get regular updates via DVD/CD.)

At some point, we committed to locking ourselves in a meeting room with our amazing privacy counsel and collaborating from dusk till dawn with all our remote partners to hit our release date.

“This project brought on a lot of complexity, ambiguity, and pivots but the teams persisted and focused to deliver in time.  From a Customer Success perspective, the CS project team was able to successfully deliver on the Customer Success components on time to ensure compliance and avoid stiff financial penalties. This included building a support model so customers get answers to their questions in a quick, efficient manner, building the needed flows and processes in systems and tools, and delivering training to over 350 European agents across the world.  The agents were able to easily manage the contacts that came in on the first day, leveraging resources available to them to help them answer their customer questions.  This is a testament to the awesome work the team has done to equip our agents with the knowledge on a sensitive and complex topic.”

Leanne Picardal-Pham, Staff Program Manager, International Care Business Partner

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Foundational work

Emails, the reckoning
The challenge: Intuit has a lot going on! There’s quite a few products and teams supporting them from in-product emails (untouched in years), Marketing (external agency created campaigns), Care, Community, and Sales.
And they all sent emails to customers. Which all looked different and not always on brand. We were getting customers reporting our own emails as phishing attempts.

And the emails coming from Sales looked downright sketchy with multiple fonts, colors, sizes and messages. (Fun fact – At that time Sales was following a thought leader who was a retired FBI hostage negotiator. His guidance to treat the customer as hostile, created emails that sounded needy, unprofessional, untrustworthy, and not Intuit at all.)

I was asked to bring order to chaos, to design new email guidelines and teach them to the rest of the org. In order not to become the Email Cop, I also created an email rating system to allow random testing instead of installing a tight traffic system.

Error messaging, aka “we’ve learned a lot since 404”
On the Content team, we pulled together a small team to overhaul our error messaging across products and create best practices.

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Chatbot

I was tapped to help out writing CUI for the new QuickBooks chatbot