Designing the Direct Feed experience for QuickBooks UK

Overview

The bank connection type in the QuickBooks UK — standard bank feeds, was used by 32% of the user base. Some banks offered subpar connection experiences and success rates. With Direct feeds there'd be a more reliable connection between the customer’s bank account and QBO, ensuring 100% data accuracy and an automatic daily update.

Target Audience
UK based accountants and small business owners with HSBC / RBS / Natwest business bank accounts.

goals

Import 100% accurate, reliable, and secure bank data into QuickBooks Online
Lower customer service call volume related to accounts with bank feed connections

The process

I. Customer Research and Development

Our primary learnings were from the customer care data.

Insights

Authentication problems is huge pain paint as there’s a dependency with online banking
With the standard connection, customers provide their bank login credentials to Intuit and their accountants
Updates can be irregular; manual updates may be necessary which creates gap in data and inaccurate books

I. Ideation

The team started out with defining the ideal state of this experience, followed by road-mapping our phased deliverables.

III. Prototyping and validation

We leveraged our global Design and Product partners to help drive our user research to validate our early design concepts. This helped us understand the overall themes with regards to the gaps/opportunities with our prototypes, which are listed below:

Difference between Screen Scraping and Direct Feeds is not clear
Overall benefit of Direct feeds is not clear
The pending account / merge flow was confusing
Authorization form is a big ask for customers

Outcome

Our solution had a compelling proposition with cost as our key differentiator as we will be offering direct feeds free for life. The authorization form is generated digitally, and after users mail the form, setup takes 6-7 working days. Lastly, the setup will start with standard feeds, which provided historical data and also instant benefit and when the direct feed was ready the connections would be merged seamlessly. We launched a quick MVP to learn from real customers and used our learnings to augment our phase II launch.

Role

Design lead—worked with distributed teams between Mountain View, CA and UK
The design team comprised a visual designer, a researcher, and a content designer

Direct feeds