Intuit
Two surfaces, opposite disciplines: a site that persuades — and the machinery that runs the product.
For a focused consulting engagement on QuickBooks Online, I designed across both the public marketing-and-conversion site and the far less glamorous, far more consequential internal tools Intuit’s own people use to run and support it. Moving between those two mindsets in one engagement is exactly the range consulting demands.
Two very different design problems, one mission.
Intuit’s whole job is taking genuinely complicated financial work and making it feel manageable to people who aren’t accountants. I stepped into that as a consultant adding senior UX/UI capacity and an outside perspective — solving well-scoped problems inside an established system, not defining strategy from scratch.
Lives and dies on clarity and persuasion — a first-time visitor gives you seconds, and every unclear step costs a conversion.
Live and die on efficiency and trust — experts doing the same task hundreds of times need speed, density, predictability.
The unglamorous machinery that has to be fast and predictable.
The bulk of the internal work was Sentinel — the Salesforce-Lightning operations suite Intuit’s teams use to run payments, risk, tax operations, corrections, notices, and company management. These are dense, expert-user, high-consequence surfaces: the opposite of a marketing page’s generous whitespace. Designing into the Lightning design system meant respecting established patterns and partnering closely with in-house designers, PMs, and engineers.
Density that stays legible.
An operations home built for people who live in the tool all day — advanced search and quick access to the entities they work across, arranged so a high-volume expert can move without friction.
One record, every angle.
Company quick-view and overview screens pull a merchant’s full picture into one place — the context an operator needs to act, without hopping between systems. The craft is holding a large, relational record legibly inside Lightning’s constraints.
The company overview and update surface — where an operator edits that same relational record in place, the density held legible inside Lightning.
Moving documents between the firm and its clients.
Within the internal tools, Document Exchange handled the flow of documents between Intuit’s agents and their clients — with an e-signature capability built on DocuSign for Salesforce folded directly into it. Three surfaces had to line up around one trustworthy exchange.
Customer widget
The client-facing side — where a customer receives, reviews, and returns documents without leaving their own context.
Agent experience
The operator’s side inside Sentinel — sending, tracking, and managing documents against a live company record.
Signing flow
The DocuSign-backed e-sign journey — viewing and affixing a signature in steps that had to feel trustworthy the whole way through.
The full flow — the e-sign journey, viewing and affixing a signature, and the customer-side experience:
Read more about Document ExchangeThe other surface of the same product.
Alongside the internal machinery sat the external QuickBooks Online site — the public marketing-and-conversion experience where prospective small-business owners learn what QBO is and sign up. That surface was outside the scope of what I designed directly, but the internal work I did had an impact on it: a product is only as convincing on its public face as the machinery behind it is sound.
The craft is in designing well inside someone else’s system — consistency over novelty.
Subordinate your style
Designing to an established language — SLDS, Intuit’s patterns — means finding the craft in consistency, not novelty.
Two faces, one product
The QBO a prospect sees and the QBO the team operates are very different design problems serving the same mission.
Consulting is velocity + perspective
Move fast on well-scoped work so the core team stays on the bigger bets — and bring the outside eye they’ve stopped being able to use.