Intuit Trends is a free online application that lets small businesses compare how they are doing financially (such as income, expenses, profits, etc.) with other businesses that are similar to them.

We talked with small business owners to find out what they most wanted to understand about how their businesses compared to their peers/competitors, and then introduced some big improvements to the previous design. This release delivers the first preliminary round of changes, and there are many more to come.

Key features of our redesign effort included in this preliminary release are:

• Introduced a new, personalized Scorecard
  • Before the redesign, the Trends application only offered small businesses the ability to view general trends about how their peers and competitors were doing. Now, small business owners can also see how their own company compares to their peers along three key business metrics and receive individual and overall scores.

• Provided a simple bar chart and scoring solution
  • Now that the site was going to show comparisons between a specific business and its peers, we needed a compelling way to present this information. To get started, we explored a variety of different design options for how best to show comparison data. Next, we usability tested our ideas and moved forward with the design that users liked best. Our final solution combined a simple bar chart with a visual quartile score, in a format that was easy for scanning.

• Created a clean, fresh, and consistent visual design
  • We all know that it is important for information on a site to not only be useful, but to also be presented in a clear, visually appealing way. To help the Trends site appeal to its audience and convey the desired tone, we created a modern, clean look and feel for the site that also followed Intuit’s brand guidelines. We also introduced a consistent color scheme to use for “Me” and “Peers” across the site to help users differentiate between the two types of data.

You can check out our redesign for yourself at: https://workplace.intuit.com/db/bejqb2kpn.
We’d love to hear what you think!

1. Mac-n-Cheese: Learning About Product Design from Comfort Foods

Comfort foods are the epitome of success. Delicious, ubiquitous, and easy. This panel of chefs and designers will explore what food can teach about product design. What makes a new recipe take-off? How do you make your product comfy on first use and then make people want to use it again?

Questions this panel will answer:

1. What do eating a food and using a technology/software/website have in common?
2. What makes comfort foods so appealing?
3. Can those same qualities translate into software/websites?
4. How do you create a new recipe that a mass audience will like as much as an old standby like mac-n-cheese?
5. How do you have a successful yet cutting edge restaurant?
6. How do you create a new product that people will feel comfortable using from the start?
7. What techniques/lessons from recipe creation (for magazines and restaurants) can be applied to the design of new technologies?
8. How do you innovate if people like known things?
9. How do you get a following for your food? For your restaurant? For your product?
10. What mistakes should you avoid when doing something new?

2. Flex, Silverlight, Javascript??? Picking your RIA Technology

Dazed and confused in a sea of technology and marketing fluff? This talk will help you pick the right technology for your Rich Internet Application based on the user experience implications. See specific examples of the trade-offs with each so that you can finally make an informed decision.

Questions this panel will answer:

1. What is a Rich Internet Application (RIA)?
2. What sorts of features should you expect a RIA platform to offer?
3. What is Microsoft Silverlight?
4. What is Adobe Flex/Air?
5. Can you create a RIA using HTML/CSS/Javascript?
6. Are there any other technology platforms to consider?
7. What are the pros and cons of each platform from a user experience perspective?
8. What are specific examples of applications using each technology effectively and ineffectively?
9. What tools are available to design for each platform?
10. What are the ten key points to think about when deciding which technology to use?

Yummly is a start up looking at the intersection of food and the internet.  They’re in stealth mode so that’s all we can say for now but we’ll keep you posted.

iConstituent is a more established company that provides email communication solutions to congresspeople. We’re working with them on a visual refresh followed by a more comprehensive user experience redesign.

We’ll post pix of our latest work as soon as we can.

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1. Large font as the primary graphic element

This trend was is rampant in all categories and was is sometimes blended with other trends I discusselements below. Oversize font was is treated as the primary visual theme and communicatesd the brand, often in black or another primarybold color.

2. Bright primary colors

Flipping through the pages, in a cursory way  I was struck by the brightness of the designs. Bright, saturated colors were are overrepresented…sometimes complimented by black or dark brown. Pastels and muted tones were are almost missing. Orange was  is  the most prominent color – used alone or in combination with other bright colors.

3. Physical objects

Many designs mimicked real physical objects in an unusual space. Aqualtis unusual bag for advertising the ability of its wool and cashmere clothing line to be thrown in themachine washing washed machine set the standard for other designs to come including large brands like Tommy Hilfiger and Coke. and many other novel uses of real goods.  Sometimes, as you can see in the Kresge annual report below, the large type theme was combined with a physical object to have both trends represented.