Morgan Marie Quinn

Operation Beat Baseline

Problem: How can we improve 2016 QuickBooks Self-Employed activation rates for our TurboTax Self-Employed customers in 2017? 

Stakeholders: QuickBooks Self-Employed product marketing, TurboTax Self-Employed product marketing 

Role: Content Design lead

Overview: Every customer who filed with TurboTax Self-Employed got a free year of QuickBooks Self-Employed. The problem was, they were activating at a lower rate than we expected and not understanding this was a package deal.

Challenges:

The challenge was to better communicate the following:

1. The product is free and included when you file

2. The features and benefits of the product

3. A sense of urgency to activate now

These were the first two products Intuit had integrated in this way, which also created some unique internal challenges for this project. The QuickBooks Self-Employed team had a different vision for the copy than the TurboTax Self-Employed team and it was difficult to get alignment from everyone. 

We brought both product marketing teams together and implemented Design for Delight techniques to come up with customer problem statements. Once we were aligned on that, I wire framed concepts and put ideas into user testing.

After several rounds of feedback from senior leadership, the working team and customers, we landed on three very divergent concepts: Hold Up! (urgency), Brand (ecosystem), and Your Best Work (aspirational). 

Since this was only the second season for this experience, we leaned into completely new, bold concepts instead of iterating on baseline. Small changes lead to small results and this was an opportunity to go big. 

Process: I worked with an interaction and visual designer to create rough wireframes that were content-only. Content really took the lead on this project, so I created placeholders for the visuals so I could use fewer resources, get quick feedback, and iterate fast.

Once the team aligned on the message and content, we were able to pop visuals in to quickly complete the designs.  

Results: The Hold Up! recipe beat baseline by 105 (total activation for the year was 130 index) and is now the new baseline for tax year 2018. This messaging was so successful we also use it for another Intuit product, Turbo.

New Product Feature - 2016

Problem: How can we help customers find and confidently claim more of their work-related expenses so they get their best possible refund?

Stakeholders:

- QuickBooks Self-Employed and TurboTax Self-Employed Product Marketing

- Engineering (both teams)

- Tax Analytics

- Data Science

- Product Managers (both teams)

Role: Content Design lead

Overview: As part of the new TurboTax Self-Employed experience, customers had the ability to connect to their banking and credit card services to import their transactions and have us sort, categorize, and suggest work-related expenses for them. The feature was enabled by functionality from QuickBooks Self-Employed, which we designed as a widget inside the TurboTax experience.

Challenges:

- Totally new interaction model for our products

- Data was inconsistent and we couldn’t rely on machine learning

- Two different technology stacks

- Bank connection was a huge barrier to entry

- Complex customer interaction needs

- Customers needed a lot of education and guidance

- Felt like a lot of work for the customer

- Alignment from two sets of teams

- Content and visual design needed to represent two brands

Process: This was a huge project, probably one of the biggest and most complex I’ve worked on in my career. I’ll share how we approached it from a design perspective, but just know there were dozens and dozens of engineers, product managers, data scientists, and tax analysts that contributed to the success of this project. In many ways, design was the least complicated part of it.

Here’s a high-level overview of how we approached designing ExpenseFinder:

Research: We spent a number of weeks with our research partners, interviewing self-employed people and watching them work on their taxes. We wanted to dig deep into how they track their expenses and what their tax prep process is like.

We quickly discovered that many customers wait until they are filing their taxes to even look for their work-related expenses. This means they spend hours digging through old bank and credit card statements, piles of receipts, and other online records to try to piece together their tax year.

This means they get stressed, miss out on critical deductions, and have potential accuracy issues. We came out of research confident this was the customer problem we wanted to tackle.

Brainstorm: We got together with our partners from tax, engineering, product management, and data science. It’s critical to involve your partners early and often and good ideas aren’t limited to designers. Everyone has something to contribute.

Thanks to all those brains in the room, we discovered the best solution to this customer problem was to create a widget inside the TurboTax Self-Employed experience that was “fueled” by QuickBooks Self-Employed.

Iterate: The widget was complex and required a lot of functionality, and there was nothing like this in our library of products, so it all had to be designed from scratch. There were also issues with the data and we couldn’t rely on machine learning because we discovered customers were consistently miscategorizing their expenses. The data is only as good as what feeds it, so we ended up designing a totally new-to-Intuit interaction model that solved for the both the categorization and data set issues.

I spent additional hours iterating on multiple aspects of the content. From “selling” users on the feature in the primer screen, to prompting bank connection, to labeling, to help content, to error messaging - it all needed to be seamless, simple, and inspire confidence in the customer. This required very close collaboration with our tax and legal partners to ensure the content was accurate and protected us from any liability.

After months of researching, brainstorming, iterating and looping through that process, we finally built and launched ExpenseFinder for tax year 2015 (live in 2016).

Results: 

- See video of the final feature here.

- Feature drove 400k new QBSE users (32% activation rate) and 19% increase in QBO payroll customers.

- Found an average of $5k in expenses per customer (up from $3,500 average for in-topic expenses) and had a 12% take rate (TT users who imported expenses).

- Developed a new partnership with QBSE, set the model for how XD should collaborate across BUs, designed the first Intuit brand handshake and presented the project to broader XD team. 

- Delivered a cohesive voice and tone and customer experience across two products.

- Inspired a new feature the following year: Industry-Specific Deductions. You can learn more about that project here.

New product feature - 2016

Problem: How can we help our self-employed customers find the deductions unique to their line of work so they don’t miss out on any money back?

Stakeholders:

- Tax analytics

- Data science

- Product Management

- Engineering

- Product Marketing

Role: Content Design lead

Overview: During our customer research for TurboTax Self-Employed a common theme popped up over and over again: Customers want to see examples of expenses that are unique to the type of work they do.

If they see a generic list, they don’t map the categories back to their work. If they see specific examples, they can claim more expenses and feel confident they are maximizing their deductions.

So, we set out on a mission to deliver a new feature that’s now known as Industry-Specific Deductions. Catchy, isn’t it?

Challenges:

- Our current data set was unreliable because customers oftentimes miscategorize their expenses. This meant we couldn’t use machine learning to inform the content - it all had to be curated by hand.

- ExpenseFinder, a feature from the previous year that could have been leveraged for this project, was disabled due to lack of engineering resources to keep it running.

Process:

This is one of the most fun projects I’ve worked on during my time at TurboTax. It was the first time I’ve really been able to realize the power of our customer data and how we can use that to deliver a totally personalized experience.

And since the customer-facing part was largely reliant on content, I got to pull from my past (and oftentimes wacky) work experiences, interview my self-employed friends, and do a lot of fact-finding to come up with distinct and unique expenses that would surprise and delight our customers.

From blogging to babysitting to car detailing to animal training, I hand-curated lists and lists of specific examples in each expense category for over 80% of the total self-employed industries (as identified by the IRS).

All that info then went into spreadsheets created by our tax experts that were later fed into the model that runs the feature today. Because of all this hand-curated content, our customers were able to claim more expenses, which in turn cleaned up our data.

Results:

- Industry-Specific Deductions delivers a data-driven personalized experience for 80%+ of TurboTax Self-Employed customers.

- The feature also finds an average of $1,500 more in expenses compared to the previous generic expenses experience.

- The feature was deemed an “Ownable Moment” by the marketing team and was featured in our advertising, marketing campaigns and front door experiences.

- This work continues to inform new features for our self-employed customers. More coming soon in 2018!

TurboTax Self-Employed Ownable Moment - 2017

Problem: How can we make a better connection between the marketing promise and the payoff in the product? 

Stakeholders: 

- Product Marketing

- Engineering

- Visual Design

- Design Technology

- TurboTax Senior Leadership 

Role: Design lead

Overview: When a self-employed person files their taxes in TurboTax, we ask for the type of work they do. Then, based on that description, we recommend very, very specific types of self-employed expenses they can deduct (aka: industry specific deductions). You can learn more about this project here.

It’s an awesome feature because it helps customers find expenses they may not have thought about (aka: more money in their pockets) and, from a product perspective, there’s a lot of incredible data curation, handcrafted content, and love from our tax experts that went into it.

Challenges: 

There were two main problems with this experience:

1. Customers had no idea all this work had been done and that the content they were seeing was truly personalized just for them, and

2. They weren’t connecting this moment to what we promised we’d do for them way back when they hit that ‘start’ button.

From the front door throughout the entire experience, the product needs to be consistently beautiful and functional for the payoff to happen. And it wasn’t happening.

A lot of the tax experience is entering data and answering questions, but there are a few moments where all the customer’s hard work and all the work being done behind the scenes comes together and we get a chance to do a big high five with our customers. And this needed to be of those moments

Process: We started with a simple question,“What is the story we want to tell?” Instead of just talking about the feature, we wanted to show the benefit and payoff.

We quickly came up with a few variations of the story. Both versions told a different story, and we actually do both, but in order to make a big impact and highlight the feature properly, you really need to narrow in on one consistent narrative with this kind of project.

Story #1: We leaned into the breadth of industries we cover, highlighting a few common industries with several recognizable expenses.

Story #2: We leaned into the depth of the expenses we can find, highlighting some of the more unique expenses you can claim.

Once we storyboarded our ideas, we got into the‘“hows” of this project: Which assets can we use? How can we customize the experience? How long should the transition last? How long will it take for the data to load or the customer to read the screen?

More challenges!

This is also the phase of the design process where we inevitably discover our limitations. In this case, there were some significant ones.

- We had to use an existing asset. 

- The story had to loop. 

- The animation couldn’t have text. 

- We couldn’t customize the animation. 

After many rounds of feedback with our stakeholders from marketing and product, we landed on the final animation. Then it was time for the content.

Here’s what I was thinking:

- What does the customer expect from this feature?

- What do they need to know at this point?

- How can we delight them?

- How much “talking” does the animation already do for me?

- How much space do we have?

- How long will it take the customer to read this?

- Will the content overshadow the animation?

- What happens before and after this moment — are we setting up the story and wrapping it up at the right point?

With those questions in mind, it was time to rewrite the story using a show and tell approach:

Step 1: Tell the customer what is going to happen.

Step 2: Show them the work that’s happening (that’s the animation)

Step 3: Show the payoff (in this case, the list of industry specific expenses)

As the content designer, here’s how I approached this:

Added more context: I adjusted the content on the screen before the animation to set the appropriate context and set up the moment.

Personalized what I could: Since we couldn’t customize the animation, I worked with engineering to pull in the customer’s line of work to the headline. This way, we were able to personalize the content in the header, which drives home the point that this is specific to the type of work they do.

Created an emotional connection: I also included some more nurturing language in the sub-header to create a deeper connection with the customer. Our extensive customer research often reveals people don’t feel like software can truly understand their unique tax situation, but we do. We really, really do.

We tested several concepts and went through multiple rounds of feedback before we finally landed on the content. Once we put that content and the new animation together, a totally new experience was born. You can see a video of the new experience here.

Results: The new experience does a much better job at setting up expectations and highlighting the payoff. It also ties the feature in much closer to what marketing was promoting on their end.

While I’m really pleased with the end result of this experience, there are still ways we can improve on the design. For example, the list of expenses after the animation still falls flat for me — especially since it follows a new, shiny design. There’s definitely opportunity to redesign this screen and carry the awesomeness of throughout the entire experience.

Despite room for more design tweaks, the feature is a success because it solves a big customer problem: We are helping them find more deductions, file with confidence, and get that max refund.

New Product Feature - 2016

Mint.com Refer-a-Friend Promotion

Goal: Leverage peak season traffic (January) and run a campaign to raise awareness and drive new user acquisition.

Context: I’m the former Managing Editor and Social Media Manager for Mint. In addition to running the blog and social media accounts, managing a team of writers, and overseeing our relationship with several creative agencies, I was often called on to run marketing campaigns.

At the time, Mint had a very lean team and we all wore multiple hats, so when it came time to run a new year’s promotion, I raised my hand to drive an idea I’d been thinking about for a few years.

Responsibilities:

- Define marketing goals and initiatives

- Set creative direction and approve execution

- Manage third-party vendors

- Manage 6-figure budget and calendar

- Coordinate with Public Relations and partner agencies

- Manage and inform internal stakeholders

A User-Friendly Guide to Digital Asset Management - 2015

Problem: How can we educate our audience and drive awareness for a service they need, but know nothing about?

Stakeholders: Product Marketing, Customer Success, Visual Design

Role: Content Manager and writer

Overview: Digital Asset Management: It’s the service most brands need, but know very little about. The Brandfolder marketing and sales teams were struggling with attracting new leads and educating prospects on the value of our service.

As the Content Manager, I identified a major gap in our library of assets. We needed something that was digestible, packaged in an easy-to-deliver format, and educational but delightful. What we needed was an e-book.

Challenges: This project wasn’t as challenging as others, but there were some hurdles to overcome. First, I had never written an e-book before so I wasn’t sure what the tricks of the trade were for this kind of content.

The subject matter was also really dry, but one of our differentiators was our brand persona and voice and tone, so I knew this was an opportunity to really lean into that and make this project stand out.

Process: Even though it was my first time writing an e-book, I pulled from my experience writing online tutorials and help content, as this project had a lot of those elements.

In general, this type of content needed to be conversational, but concise. It’s critical to find the balance of personality through voice and tone and transactional content. You want to engage the customer, but not fatigue them by being verbose or taking them on an unnecessary emotional journey.

When it came down to the format of the e-book, I applied similar principles I use when writing short-form content:

- Identify the problem and goal

- Define the storyline

- Create an outline

- Bullet point each section of the story

- Decide how the story should end (in this case, we wanted the customer to contact us for more information)

Once I drafted the content, I met with our visual designer to go over the layout and what each section needed to include. I had rough notes in my outline of what I envisioned and she took it from there.

We worked closely together on many projects, so it didn’t take many rounds of revisions to get it right. One of the benefits at working for small startups is working in a nimble and agile environment - it only took about a week from start to launch.

Results: This project ended up being The Little e-Book That Could. In just under two months, it resulted in driving over $100,000 in business. That’s pretty great for a small startup!

Before I became a Content Designer, I had a career in freelance writing. I’ve written about everything from parenting to product reviews to home and garden tips. However, personal finance writing is my main area of expertise.

I actually started working in personal finance in 2001, long before a career in writing was even on my radar. I’ve worked in banking, lending, real estate, and consumer education.

That experience eventually merged with my freelance writing work and that’s the start of how I got where I am today.

This is just a sample of some of my freelance writing. Please let me know if you’d like to see more.