Design Thinking

Intuit’s
Design-Driven CEO on Building
Company a
by Brad Smith
From the Magazine (January–February 2015)

Summary. Although 46 similar products were on the market when Intuit launched
Quicken, in 1983, it immediately became the market leader in personal finance
software and has held that position for three decades. That’s because Quicken was
so well designed that using it is... more

When Scott Cook cofounded

Intuit, in 1983, many other
companies were already offering
software to help people track
their finances. In fact, at least 46
similar products launched
before Quicken, the product
Cook created, which is why we
sometimes joke about how
instead of having the first-mover
advantage, Intuit had the “47th
mover advantage.” The original
version of Quicken offered only
one-third the features that many
competing products had, but
with an important difference: It
Timothy Archibald
was well designed. Instead of
looking like a spreadsheet, it displayed the familiar images of a
check register and an individual check. Because the design made
using the product so intuitive, Quicken immediately became the
market leader in personal finance software. It has held that
position for three decades.

Over the years, however, we strayed from our focus on great

design. By early 2008, when I became CEO, design wasn’t as
central to the company. Our research found that the number one
reason customers would recommend our products to others was
“ease of use”—and the number one reason they wouldn’t
recommend them was also “ease of use.” Ease of use and design
are slightly different things, and we had become overly focused
on adding incremental features and functionality that delivered
ease but not necessarily delight. We needed to think about
emotions—how customers felt about our products and whether
they took pleasure in using them. We began talking about “design
for delight.” I asked our employees to name the companies they
thought were most innovative, and many of them mentioned
Apple, Facebook, and Google. I wanted Intuit to be at the top of
their lists. Great design would play a major role in that. Early in
my tenure I set a long-term goal: By 2020 Intuit will be considered
one of the most design-driven companies in the world.

We’ve made great progress toward that goal. We’ve increased the
number of designers at Intuit by nearly 600%. We now hold
quarterly design conferences, and we routinely bring in people
who’ve created beautifully designed products, such as the Nest
thermostat and the Kayak travel website, to share insights with
our employees. We’ve challenged everyone who works for us—
even our lawyers and accountants—to think deeply about how
design should be part of their jobs. And we’ve introduced
innovative, smartly designed features that are helping our
customers make a more emotional connection with the company
—and increasing its market share.
Drivers of Delight
Although I care deeply about design, I don’t have much formal
design training. I grew up in a small town in West Virginia and
attended Marshall University, where I studied business
administration. After college I spent seven years working in the
packaged goods industry at PepsiCo and 7Up, and I earned a
masters in management at night at Aquinas College in Michigan.
After that I worked at Advo, a direct marketing company, and the
payroll company ADP, where I started its first internet division. I
was drawn to Intuit in 2003, and over the next five years I ran all
three of its big businesses—the Accountant division (which builds
relationships with accounting professionals), Consumer Tax
(whose flagship product is TurboTax), and the Small Business
division, which sells QuickBooks and payroll products.

Even before I became CEO, I’d been working to help our teams
understand what makes a product experience delightful. Ease of
use is important, but it’s not everything. We began talking about
customers’ end-to-end experience, which includes shopping,
buying, and customer support. I started asking employees about
the products and services they encountered in their own lives.
Why do you love a product? What are the drivers of delight? And
we developed D4D (design for delight), which clearly articulated
Intuit’s approach to design thinking, based on deep customer
empathy, idea generation, and experimentation. D4D is vital
because it provides the entire company with a common
framework for building great products.
The challenge then was to integrate design thinking into every
part of Intuit. In 2007 we used a day of our company leadership
conference to get people thinking more broadly about design. We
asked participants to bring in products that truly delighted them,
and they took turns telling the group about their items. One
person brought in an innovative backpack. Another spoke about a
child’s sippy cup. I showed a wine opener that uses a CO2 cylinder
as its power source. You stick a needle through the cork, and the
device sends pressurized gas into the bottle, forcing the cork out.
The exercise raised our awareness of great design but didn’t
convert into as much action as we’d hoped.

We kept looking for new ways to instill design thinking. To help

things along, we even tried changing the layout of our office
spaces. We reduced the number of cubes and added more areas
for collaboration and impromptu work. We also began paying
closer attention to how our competitors were using design to
delight customers. A lot of the best design innovation comes from
start-ups that are born in garages and dorm rooms. Two examples
—Mint and ZenPayroll—are particularly relevant.

Since its creation, Quicken personal finance software has required

users to key in a lot of data. In the end the customer sees clear,
well-presented budgets and pie charts, but patience may be
required to reach that payoff. By 2009 Mint had found a great
solution to this. Its founder built in features that allowed you to
enter your bank password and download all your spending
information automatically, eliminating data entry and showing
you a pie-chart view of your finances in minutes. We liked the
design of Mint so much that we acquired it. We’d always been
aware of the deferred gratification element; now we measure the
lag using the phrase “time to pie”—the number of minutes
between when you begin using a program and when you get the
first payoff.

ZenPayroll inspired us to think differently as well. Most people

consider the payroll function to be an administrative nuisance.
ZenPayroll realized that the act of paying employees is a great
opportunity to celebrate them and increase engagement. Its
system sends employees notes along the lines of “Woo-hoo—it’s
payday! You’re a rock star! Here’s your check!” It’s less formal and
more whimsical than traditional payday procedures. The
company is now an active partner on our QuickBooks Online
platform.

Slowly, design thinking began to take hold. We repeated the show-

and-tell exercise with our leaders in 2012, and afterward we talked
about what their chosen products had in common. Did they do
the job they were supposed to do? Did they function more easily
than expected? How did people feel while using them? Regardless
of our roles in the company, each of us quickly realized that we
recognized beautiful design when we encountered it and that we
should be delivering the same experience to our customers.

Admittedly, most people don’t think of financial software as a

category driven by emotion or design. We sometimes say that
Intuit products are “required but not desired.” One team member
questioned whether it was even possible to create financial
software that customers would perceive as well designed or that
would foster an emotional connection. So we logged on to read
the user ratings for our most popular products and review the
comments being posted by both promoters and detractors.
Clearly we were creating emotion. The question we asked
ourselves was “Is this the emotion we seek to generate?”

Consider TurboTax, our market-leading tax software. Consumers

spend 6 billion hours each year using software to prepare their
income taxes; anything we can do to reduce that time will be a
gift. At the end of the process, most taxpayers are owed a refund—
and for 70% of them, that refund is the single largest check they’ll
receive during the year. In this context we began to think less
about the pure functionality of our software and more about the
emotional payoff of reducing drudgery and speeding the way
toward a big windfall.
Design as a Team Sport
We didn’t limit our conversations to employees directly involved
in developing our products—we tried to get everyone thinking
about design. We asked people in the finance department to
consider how easy it is to submit a purchase order and whether
that process could be streamlined. In HR we talked about the
overall design of the job application and interview process—from
the time candidates first encounter the employment section of
our website right up to the moment someone is hired. Intuit has
8,000 employees, and we want them all thinking about how to
improve the design of products and services, even if those
offerings are intended for internal support only.

Of course, talking and thinking about design wouldn’t accomplish

much if it didn’t show up in our products. By early 2010 we were
offering some enhancements to our customers. For instance, we
began adding features to TurboTax that let people make more
comparisons between years and import some information directly
from year to year, limiting the number of questions the program
asks them. From our research we know that among married
couples, one partner usually takes responsibility for tax
preparation, and the other spouse’s primary question is “Why is it
different from last year?” With that in mind we designed several
new features (which we referred to internally as “the Spouse
Test”) to make it really clear what changed from year to year.

Talking and thinking about design

wouldn’t accomplish much if it didn’t
show up in our products.

We also came up with an app called SnapTax. This was driven by

consumers’ migration to smartphones. Because preparing taxes
requires inputting data, you’d think people wouldn’t want to do it
on a mobile device. But our team played around with the idea of
allowing users to take photos of their W-2 forms. The program
automatically recognizes the data and inputs it directly into
TurboTax. SnapTax was the first tool to allow people to
completely prepare and e-file federal and state returns from their
smartphones, and we were amazed by the response. Within two
weeks of its release it had replaced Angry Birds as the number one
app on iTunes. User reviews were astonishing. One person wrote,
“I want this app to have my babies.” Another told us he was able to
do his taxes from the bathtub with SnapTax. User after user gave
it a five-star rating. It was a clear win for our D4D vision.

We made many other, smaller changes. We began using emoticons

in the customer interface. We revamped support and help
functions in the software, streamlining them to be more intuitive;
as a result, our phone service reps are receiving 24% fewer calls
from confused users. We spent tens of thousands of hours
working alongside customers to see how they actually use our
products; as we did, we made notes with smiley faces next to
elements that customers enjoyed and sad faces at places where
they hit a snag—an example of using design to simplify the
feedback mechanism. We’ve emphasized to engineers, product
managers, and designers that functionality isn’t enough anymore.
We have to build emotion into the product.

In 2006 we had six designers at the executive level; today we have

35. We needed more design muscle to make all these changes, and
now we have it. The designers report directly to the general
managers of our product divisions, which gives them a seat at the
table alongside engineers and product developers.

Better design is showing up in our business results. TurboTax

revenue grew by 7% in 2014, and the product gained two points of
market share from competitors. In the early 2000s we used design
to confront the shift toward “freemium,” in which many of our
competitors were offering stripped-down versions of their
 software free to people online, hoping to persuade them to pay for
upgrades and more features. We resisted pressure to make our
version plain. If we were going to offer a free product, we’d make
it the most beautiful free product on the market. Our motto
became “Delight, don’t dilute.” That strategy worked: In the do-it-
yourself tax software category, which includes “free” products,
Intuit has a greater than 60% market share, whereas our next-
largest competitor is at 18%.

I think many companies find themselves in the position we were

in a few years ago. Our product development process was too
incremental and focused on features and ease of task completion.
We needed an awakening and more of a grand vision. We needed
all our people to understand that designing great products and
user experiences is a team sport that includes not just designers
and product managers but everybody else—even the CEO. Today
we really are a customer-focused, design-driven technology
company. And by 2020 we’ll be even better.
ABusiness
version Review.
of this article appeared in the January–February 2015 issue of Harvard

BS
Brad Smith is the CEO of Intuit.

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