Business Need

Intuit QuickBooks offers a very successful payroll service with over 1 million customers. When Intuit decided to redesign the service, adding more structure and guidance to users and integrating new e-pay and e-file functionality, they asked Sliced Bread Design to help. Their goal was to understand the needs of current payroll users and create new workflows and screens to improve the accuracy and ease of paying payroll liabilities. Designers at Sliced Bread Design worked as a part of the QuickBooks team for close to a year, helping Intuit move from initial concept to implementation to release.

Strategy & Solution

In order to create a more usable interface, we:

• Held a series of contextual inquiries in several locations across the country to understand how user approach to payroll payments differed from state to state
• Mocked up multiple competing designs for meeting user needs and then tested them against each other to identify the most effective approach
• Worked closely with the engineering and product marketing team; we followed an Agile development process to solve usability issues within significant technological constraints
• Conducted numerous informal and formal usability studies to launch with confidence a new design to replace one that had been in place for many years
• Wrote comprehensive specification used by engineering and QA to govern all of their implementation and quality assurance activities