The Intuit Harmony Design System: Insights from Joe Preston

A different company wouldn’t have tried to pull off a project as risky as Harmony. A major change for the industry was the move to the software as a service model, often referred to as “the cloud.” This was a reinvention of the software publishing model that had customers pay a subscription fee to access software online rather than buy a copy for their desktop. SaaS meant companies could push out updates to their customers faster. It also made many things easier for customers, including remote access to work and simplified installs. Separately, we did arrive at using the React for our UI components, so we built our UI components using React, ES6 syntax. Then, separately, we’re looking to do similar with native mobile components, and so we’ve got some competing technologies at play.

QuickBooks too has been doing some really interesting stuff in terms of … The new sort of text stack we’re moving with is something that the whole company actually really likes that new text stack. If you do believe that your job as a design system is really to enable the products to do the best work that they can and to support them, but not to be the determinant factor of what gets released in products. The other 30% of my time, I’m trying to dedicate to the Intuit design system and make it more over time. I worked on the design, and development of the new QuickBooks Design System, as part of the QuickBooks Design System team. My job consisted on evaluating and redesigning existing components, creating new components from scratch and devising methods for the distribution and consumption of the QBDS system across the organization. This system is used by a team of more than 150 designers and ensures design consistency across all the QuickBooks products.

Each product is designed individually but maintains the look and feel of the ecosystem. Get tips on hiring, onboarding, and structuring a design team with insights from DesignOps leaders. I think you can go really big like I would actually say we probably maybe have too big of a design system sometimes or you can go really small. You can just do like the mini Bootstrap library.

Two years ago – Intuit’s Small Business Group had lots of products that didn’t look alike, behave alike, or share data and services. We began to branch out into cloud-based products, and our users expected these products to work together, but our businesses all had different priorities, roadmaps, and resources, and all worked in silos. Design-driven innovation was no longer a radical new approach. The industry—and Intuit’s competitors—was also using these processes to build successful businesses; many of them had learned their methods from Intuit. And although Intuit had successfully extended their experience to mobile, they had yet to take advantage of the cloud, a space their competitors were already at home in. Dos and don’ts are another great way to show more example-based guidelines in terms of where you’d be prescriptive.

Our mission was to support, enable, champion and recruit for the Product Design major. As president I helped facilitate several events including mixers, socials, career fairs, job talks, workshops, and portfolio reviews. I’m passionate about spreading design thinking methods across all disciplines. Along with two co-workers, I helped design and teach an intro course in design thinking for Earth Sciences students at Stanford. I was responsible for instructing the ideation-phase lectures and designing the activities to go with them.

Senior Experience Designer Intuit | 2013 – 2014

This product and company has helped millions of people make money and businesses achieve success. It is an unattainable goal to have done all this with out complaints. But complaints if taken properly will make a company only stronger. Scott Cook’s famous kitchen table sits in Intuit’s Cook Campus Center. The walls around it are covered with whiteboards, and anyone can sit at the table to meet, brainstorm, or work.

Because the interface is different, some QuickBooks users have not been happy about having to find new locations for old functions that they were accustomed to working with. However, Intuit has developed several simple concepts to help users to find features consistently. Auto-fill commonly requested information for the customer and provide insights to help users improve their business financials. Design for the customer and instill confidenceBe trustworthy and helpful. Help users understand what to expect through progress charting and First Time Use tips. Provide useful views that guide toward common tasks.

Intuit Album Information

It’s plenty fine for most start-ups and most small companies. There are pretty easy matrix you can make in terms of cost benefit ratios about adopting the design system, and you can make tradeoffs about what are the elements of the system that you need to be aware, and so we did a lot of that. In terms of … We also identified like who are influencers amongst each of the product groups and made sure that they had a hand in helping not only gather use cases, but helping review the design proposals that were coming through, so that they felt like their voice is heard. The central team really acts as…making sure the work scales for the ecosystem, making sure the documentation is tight, and then making sure that the information is served, collected centrally, and disseminated out to all the teams.

Don’t leave the user hanging; provide dynamic feedback where possible. Be simple, easy to use, and guidingEstablish a familial resemblance. Drive consistency and integration in the experience to keep the journey seamless, familiar, and harmonious. High level corner shot of a sign in/up pattern & styles document I’ve been working on with @Andrew Firstenberger & @Erica Katrak to add to one of our internal style guides, Harmony… Unify its disparate interaction models and interfaces into one coherent ecosystem across the various products.

Member Event: Collection Tour with Jan Petry – Intuit

Whereas when you sit down with them, and you open up the IDE, and you start changing the code, boy, it was a lot faster than anyone expected. I think it depends on the element that we’re using, but let’s say like a UI component gets introduced. What we’re starting to measure now is the number of contributions to that UI component. Essentially, if we don’t have component code yet, then we would start production, but a lot of these things will finish with a code component, but it could be other things. It could be adding styling variables to our CSS framework. It could be … We added a new color to our color palette because we realized that we’re having some accessibility issues with one of our colors in particular.

Bloomerang is the community-focused nonprofit donor management software built to deliver a better giving experience and help organizations thrive. “Nonprofits can now benefit from two best-in-class solutions to create a better experience for donors and nonprofit employees, so they can spend more time on furthering their mission.” Once you are able to transition, a notice of this information will appear on the top of your screen.

Screen Designs

Photograph courtesy Jan PetryClosed captions will be available at the virtual program. Please contact Lindsey Wurz at with questions related to accessibility accommodations. The app is full of complex forms, and our mantra was enter data once and use it everywhere. Celebrate data while respecting user and device context.

And they were responsible for teaching new Catalysts. The initial group of nine would grow to over 200. Years of incremental additions and piecemeal days sales in inventorys had turned QuickBooks into an awkward application with a dated interface. Intuit had developed its mobile platform late in the game, creating an inconsistent experience. If Intuit wanted to stay ahead of these new competitors–and the market–they would need to return to their roots.

2015 – 2016

From now on, there would be one team with one goal, and it would be design-driven. In 2013, five years after Smith took the helm, Intuit was seeing the benefits of innovation and producing successful products, but to stay on top they would need to keep evolving. The company was still a collection of walled-off products and, although innovation was the goal, it wasn’t the reality in many departments. A focus on profits and products had watered down their culture of user-focused design. Over a decade after those early guerrilla user testing days, Intuit recognized it faced the “Innovator’s Dilemma”–the company was doing a good job of supporting their core products but they weren’t having any success creating new products and they weren’t keeping pace with the changing software industry. Like a product, you need to have a roadmap, and you need to almost have a product manager to it, and you can have … By what sprint do you want to have X?

Rallied a 150-person organization behind our mission to dramatically reinvent the new user experience. Led rapid prototyping and build cycles to deliver $28M in revenue and a 2pt improvement in trial to sign up conversion. We started with a vision, used Intuit’s design for delight methods to have empathy for our users, and then created design principles. Institute a completely new way of working for Intuit’s designers and developers that placed the needs of the company above the needs of the individual business unit.

The course was https://1investing.in/-based, resulting in web and print portfolios showcasing student work. Students learned HTML & CSS, product photography, and participated in company tours at local design firms. The QuickBooks ecosystem now integrates all of our small business products together. They all share a common look, feel, behavior, and data across platforms and devices. QuickBooks Online is a subscription-based accounting software that gives you the freedom to work on the go.

• Intentionally or not, the table is a symbol for user-centered design and how it improves people’s lives.
• Here are a few answers that may help them along the way.
• I love experimenting with brand design, graphic design, print design, website design, and more!
• Rallied senior executive leadership and the full cross-functional leadership team behind the initiative, while directly managing 4 PMs and 9 designers whose work led to an all-time high PRS score and a 2pt lift in retention.

To bring D4D to Intuit, Cook turned to a gifted in-house design director, Kaaren Hanson. Hanson, in turn, put together a team of nine people to help her. In making her selections, she was not only looking for user-centered design thinking but she also needed people interested in working together to solve problems. She wanted them to be outgoing and, most importantly, they needed to be passionate about sharing their skills and experience. If they were going to make a difference, they had to empower other people.