QuickBooks for Accountants

Company: QuickBooks/Intuit

Role: Information Architect, UX designer

QuickBooks is accounting software, and their bread and butter are small business owners. However, there is a flip side to their business — the accountants that manage the books for those small businesses. A common theme QuickBooks hears is that accountants don’t feel the love. So, they approached the team at Periscope to do a full site redesign of quickbooks.com/accountants in an effort to make it the “One Place for Accountants”.

The project

We embarked on a 6 month long adventure through discovery, research, design, and development to design a site experience that will give those accountants some much needed love. We ran the project in a hybrid agile/waterfall approach with representatives from the QuickBooks client as embedded members on our team.

collaborative process

The success of this project was our tight-knit team that collaborated on all aspects of the project no matter our unique area of expertise. Along the way we had to adjust and adapt to ever evolving feature logs, deadlines, and style guides. But the constant communication and shared ownership of the end product meant that we all, client and internal team alike, had equal stake in the end result.

takeaways

If I had it to do over again, I would work harder to engage the development team earlier and more often to ensure our ideas and designs were scalable and feasible within the aggressive timeline. The site is live (in pieces) and I would love to talk more about my team’s successes and failures on this job. This project taught me, more than ever, the importance of clear, detailed, consistent documentation and how valuable high-fidelity wireframes are to a project, even if it is something the client will never see.

Experience Architect: Bret Herzog

UI Designers: Kate Johnson, Dan Erickson

Creative Director: AJ Scherbring