QuickBooks Streamlined Onboarding

QuickBooks is a financial management and accounting software for small businesses. The onboarding experience is a mandatory series of screens that all customers funnel through upon sign up.

QuickBooks Ecosystem Onboarding

The QuickBooks onboarding experience was an extensive, mandatory flow upon first-time use of the product. From a business perspective, it was tied to critical metrics that ensured customers experience value from QuickBooks from the get-go. It took an average of 18 minutes to complete.

Goal: Understand customer needs, expectations, and mental models around onboarding and set up.

Why: A gap in internal metrics and customer feedback revealed a disconnect between the way the business was defining customer success and how customers were actually getting set up in QuickBooks.

Results: Launched a new, streamlined onboarding experience that decreased average onboarding time by ~13 minutes, thereby increasing completion rates of core tasks tied with retention.

Skills

Identifying research opportunity, project scoping, study design, data triangulation, stakeholder management

Date

December 2023 - Feb 2024

Team

Lead researcher (myself)
1 UX researcher
3 product designers
1 product manager
1 content designer

My role

I owned and managed this project from end-to-end, and my responsibilities included the following:

  • Identified knowledge gap in the organization and research opportunity

  • Designed a study to answer critical questions to improve the current experience

  • Pitched the study to stakeholders in different business units across the organization and incorporated feedback into the study brief

  • Formed a team of multidisciplinary partners across relevant teams

  • Fielded and delivered the research

Research Objective

We set out to investigate the following:

  1. What are customer mental models and expectations for onboarding?

  2. At what point does a QuickBooks customer feel “fully set up”? How do these compare to our internal benchmarks?

  3. What are the barriers to completing set up and experiencing product payoff?

Methodology

1:1 In-depth interviews

Spoke to 15 customers to understand expectations and mindsets around set up of different products within the ecosystem.

Diary study

Followed customers along the rest of their setup journey on their own time, at their own pace.

Contextual inquiry

Observed customers actually sign up and get onboarded to QB to identify friction points during sign-up and first-time use.

Product data analysis

Analyzed Qualtrics and Tableau dashboards to identify behavioral trends in onboarding.

Deliverables

Journey map

Mapped customers’ onboarding experience, highlighting key moments and friction points. Provided data-backed evidence of when customers feel “fully set up”

Insights and Opportunity Areas

Durable onboarding insights applicable to any onboarding experience within the QuickBooks ecosystem.

Opportunity areas highlighting immediate action items as well as future roadmap items.

Customer mindsets

Delivered framework to understand customers’ mental models around setup and intentions of how they will use QuickBooks

Roadmap planning + customer empathy workshop

Facilitated customer empathy workshop with multidisciplinary team to digest learnings and prioritize customer needs. We then incorporated these into the five-year product roadmap and business strategy.

Business Outcomes

Organizational impact

  • Provided the first overarching, ecosystem level view of onboarding, from SKU selection to ongoing use which helped teams understand the full customer journey

  • Delivered durable insights that can be applied to onboarding experiences across QB products

  • Connected various teams within Intuit to understand how their experiences intersect

Product impact

  • Six usability issues identified and logged into JIRA to be resolved.

  • Launched a new streamlined onboarding flow with improved Customer Effort Score by ~3%

  • Increased onboarding completion rates by ~7%

  • Reduced average onboarding time by ~13 minutes

Strategic impact

  • Shaped five-year business strategy for onboarding

  • Highlighted a core onboarding task that was previously unrecognized.