Surreal Notions

“Struggle is good.”  Or so my high school English teacher quipped on a regular basis.  I suppose part of me, a big part perhaps, agrees.  It’s a bitter sweet thing when Intuit closed the Omaha office.  On the one hand, there is much I left unfinished.  On the other hand, it forced me to find something different, which might be better in the long run.

I enjoyed my brief time at Intuit; however, with rising prospects elsewhere leaving opens up innumerable opportunities I would have either overlooked or bypassed while at Intuit.  There is something to be said for constantly throwing oneself into the raptures of change and chaos.  It might be crazy… or it might be brilliant.  Haven’t decided which just yet

Maybe I’ll still have a chance to work on some of those lingering projects as a contractor in a few months.  And, if nothing else, I learned a few things, made some improvements in a few products, and met some really great people.  Any experience with all of that must have been worth it.

On the plus side, a majority of the people from the office are joining a new startup called Sojern.  I’m not a big fan of the misspelling of sojourn (to have a safe and successful trip or journey); however, the business plan is interesting.  I’m negotiating a part-time contract with Sojern along with a couple other possible clients.

Of course, I have every confidence that the entire group will land on their respective feet without any trouble.  The whole office was comprised of experienced professionals with more than a bit of entrepreneurial spirit.

Intuit initially hired me as a staff UI Designer to support TurboTax® Estimated Taxes.  Although I designed interaction for numerous projects while at Intuit, this project represents the majority of my time and effort.  I worked closely with a talented team of engineering, QA, support, domain experts, and product management personnel.

We conducted several usability and marketing studies from late 2006 to early 2007.  Each study focussed on different aspects of the user experience ranging from SEO to help the user find the application to specific tasks a returning user wants to accomplish.  Among the many learnings from this research, we found the majority of our users were elderly retirees.  In fact, the initial offering had substantial negative feedback around navigation and confidence.  Basically, users had trouble finding where the tasks lived and weren’t sure when they were done with the task.  We also saw high rates of abandonment during setup.

To mitigate these concerns, I started by redesigning the setup user experience from a 14 step process to 3 steps.  This reduced the abandonment rate and initial confusion.  It also allowed users to get into the product and use it before deciding if the product solves for their specific needs.

Once in the product, the home page redesign used a checklist metaphor to help guide the users to the tasks necessary for their specific needs.  The checklist or action list guided users to next steps required by the IRS, errors that must be corrected, and points of concern within their account.  Several variants and metaphors were tested during usability, but the checklist metaphor clearly rang with the majority of subjects.

I went on to simplify the filing process to a single screen from a 4 step process; simplified the account management and reports sections; and improved navigation and confidence within the estimated taxes calculator.

Although these improvements were met with resounding positive feedback, technical changes with a third-party component has forced Intuit to temporarily deactivate the product.  Plans are moving forward to work around the third-party component and open TurboTax Estimated Taxes up to the public again or imbed the functionality within TurboTax desktop products.

Designed interaction for two of four teams assigned to TurboTax® Business 2007.  While conducting several usability studies, I helped the team of tax experts improve form selection, expenses, and other areas particularly confusing or troublesome for users.  One thing to note here, the TurboTax Business product is built upon Intuit’s professional product.  It is a fairly complete solution, but still contains quite a bit of content originally written for accountants.

The form selection process was reduced to a single screen.  With the help of tax experts and a copyrighter, we improved the layout and reduced confusion between the different options.  For instance, a few rare instances require unusual filing practices.  Rather than making these possibilities differentiated selections (giving them equal weight to the more common options), we improved the help content and limited the user to simpler options.  Although this might create confusion for the odd-ball filer, our studies found the percentage of filers with those conditions to be well below 5% and a majority of them understood their situation and didn’t require help.  Usability indicated users not only found the correct form faster, but were much more confident in their selection and the rest of the product.

The single biggest problem small business owners have when filing taxes, assuming their books are accurate, is correctly assigning business expenses.  To improve this process, we decided to use a novel way of customizing examples in each expense section to better represent the type of expenses the user is likely to have.  For instance, if the user indicates his/her business is a manufacturing plant, expenses commonly associated with manufacturing are displayed in the respective expense sections.  It’s not likely a consultant has farming expenses, so we leave them off-screen in the help section and concentrate on travel and office expenses.  Usability firmly supported our hypothesis that users are more confident of choices when one or two examples exactly match their needs.

I look forward to picking up a copy of TurboTax Business 2007 when it becomes available to see how everything works for my business.

Great news everybody!  Philip Haine (Obvious Design, Steal this Idea) has invited me to work with some of his clients, because he’s taking a sabbatical to finish his book on product vision.  Philip and I worked briefly together on a couple projects at Intuit, and I’m really excited to have the opportunity to learn some more from him.  Philip has been a user interface designer for years and consulting for about 11 years.  Needless to say, I have much to learn from the Jedi Master.

Philip was the primary designer behind TurboTax Expense Pro (I had a bit of input simply because I sit 30 feet from the developers).  He also worked on MyCorp and TurboTax Business.  In fact, Expense Pro and MyCorp are the two products with the most potential at Intuit in my opinion.  Philip designed very solid interfaces for both applications.  Philip walked me through the terrifying complexity of MyCorp with ease… which is quite a statement considering the hundreds upon hundreds of offering combinations possible–each with legal and financial implications.

I should have my official LLC documents within a couple weeks, so it is looking up for the consulting gig.  With Philip’s generous help and a little luck, I’ll be able to get involved with a couple Silicon Valley projects before the end of the year.

I will be starting a short-term contract with Northern Natural Gas next week to help clean up an internal application and lay down some UI groundwork for a longer term consolidation effort.  Effectively a survivor of the Enron debacle (or maybe they were just purchased by one of the fragmented companies that came out of Enron), NNG supplies natural gas from Texas to Lake Superior.

I’ll be working at their headquarters in Omaha, which should be interesting.  I’ve heard good things about the work environment, but suspect the internal IT projects are underfunded with poorly implemented incentives around the business unit… which is pretty status quo for IT in my experience.  Either way, this will keep me busy through at least the first week or two of September, which is good.  With a little luck I’ll have the consulting business up to speed by the time this contract runs out.

I am in the process of forming an LLC to start independent consulting.  This, with a little luck, will help me put my skills to the test.  Most importantly, I hope to get involved with some interesting projects around the country that push interaction design to the limits and test my ability to manage product vision.

Sorry about lack of content on this post, but I’m excited to see where this leads.