QuickBooks Mexico

Creating and launching a new QuickBooks product in Mexico.

A project for Intuit

Role: Lead designer, research, and strategy

Tacos eaten: Lost count

QuickBooks saw an opportunity to launch in Mexico. However the product was not localized for Mexico and did not differentiate itself from the competition in any meaningful way.

I worked on a small team made of a product manager, a content designer, and a researcher in Mexico City. My role was to design a QuickBooks product that would be market ready and to solve for pain points not discovered or addressed by the other products in the market.

Timeline and goals

From first post-it note to successful launch, this project took six months. Across the six months, the goals were to:

1. Create a ready-for-market product

2. Improve the expected and design the unexpected

3. Deliver the first full end-to-end solution

1. Create a ready-for-market product

In order for QuickBooks to be ready for the Mexico market, the product needed to be compliant with Mexico’s business rules and regulations. Along with compliance, users needed to feel familiar with it and confident on first use. The last thing we could do was frustrate or worse, scare away users from using a new product.

To accomplish this the team and I learned the necessary rules for operating a business in Mexico along with how to perform the different tasks that a business would have to do. We also studied and used the other products available to understand what flows our users would expect and be familiar with.

2. Improve the expected and design the unexpected

With a beta version of QuickBooks Mexico, the next step was to find ways to improve the basics and most importantly, identify new opportunities to design for delight. If we could make the standard functions our users had come to expect even better and introduce new benefits exclusive to our product, we would have a better chance at getting users to use QuickBooks.

The team and I did multiple things to see how we could improve and innovate. The most effective things were:

Conducted “follow me homes” where we were able to follow businesses along their daily workdays. This gave me the opportunity me to be able to learn what users truly did and how they ran their businesses in their own space instead of in our office.
We released the beta to a group of users that grew over time while keeping in contact with them through WhatsApp, as well as setting up a weekly feedback loop.
I created my own different accounting product which allowed me to find out what the market wanted and to test new ideas out rapidly, separate from QuickBooks.

All the research and testing gave me the opportunity to constantly refine and introduce new designs at a rapid pace. I was able to shift the focus from compliance to saving time and easy, fast reconciliation.

Some of the new things we were able to create in QuickBooks Mexico included:

An auto-fill search function that allowed users to quickly find a specific product/service code out the thousands that existed (fun fact: there is a specific code for the weight of bananas).
A far more simplified invoicing process than other products that also connected with the Mexican government’s invoice approval process. This connection allowed the user to see success in real time after submission or pointed out errors beforehand at no penalty to the business.
A bank connection flow that showed the immediate benefit in doing so that was paired with a strong sense of security through visuals and interactions. This was important because bank connection was a sensitive topic that a lot of businesses were afraid of doing due to a history of data breaches and fraud with other products.

3. Deliver the first full end-to-end solution

There was no single end-to-end solution for business accounting in Mexico due to how complicated it would be to make everything work together in one product with Mexico’s rules and regulations. Yet businesses were ok with the poorly put together experiences and spending a lot of time working across multiple solutions because they had gotten used to it.

In order to make QuickBooks Mexico the first single end-to-end option every feature, function, and interaction had to work seamlessly with one another and feel natural from start to finish. This also meant that every opportunity to simplify our product where possible had to be done with meaningful intent rather than just because we could because users were used to doing more than necessary and found that familiar.

Results

After the successful launch of QuickBooks Mexico, I stayed on the project for another two months. After those two months:

QuickBooks Mexico had over 1,600 customers
84% of users used QuickBooks as their end to end and only accounting product
User feedback showed an average of 78% less time spent on tasks when using QuickBooks
14% higher multiple task completion rate than the market product average

QuickBooks Mexico

QuickBooks Mexico

Creating and launching a new QuickBooks product in Mexico.

A project for Intuit

Role: Lead designer, research, and strategy

Tacos eaten: Lost count

QuickBooks saw an opportunity to launch in Mexico. However the product was not localized for Mexico and did not differentiate itself from the competition in any meaningful way.

I worked on a small team made of a product manager, a content designer, and a researcher in Mexico City. My role was to design a QuickBooks product that would be market ready and to solve for pain points not discovered or addressed by the other products in the market.

Timeline and goals

From first post-it note to successful launch, this project took six months. Across the six months, the goals were to:

1. Create a ready-for-market product

2. Improve the expected and design the unexpected

3. Deliver the first full end-to-end solution

1. Create a ready-for-market product

2. Improve the expected and design the unexpected

The team and I did multiple things to see how we could improve and innovate. The most effective things were:

Conducted “follow me homes” where we were able to follow businesses along their daily workdays. This gave me the opportunity me to be able to learn what users truly did and how they ran their businesses in their own space instead of in our office.

We released the beta to a group of users that grew over time while keeping in contact with them through WhatsApp, as well as setting up a weekly feedback loop.

I created my own different accounting product which allowed me to find out what the market wanted and to test new ideas out rapidly, separate from QuickBooks.

All the research and testing gave me the opportunity to constantly refine and introduce new designs at a rapid pace. I was able to shift the focus from compliance to saving time and easy, fast reconciliation.

Some of the new things we were able to create in QuickBooks Mexico included:

An auto-fill search function that allowed users to quickly find a specific product/service code out the thousands that existed (fun fact: there is a specific code for the weight of bananas).

A far more simplified invoicing process than other products that also connected with the Mexican government’s invoice approval process. This connection allowed the user to see success in real time after submission or pointed out errors beforehand at no penalty to the business.

3. Deliver the first full end-to-end solution

Results

After the successful launch of QuickBooks Mexico, I stayed on the project for another two months. After those two months:

QuickBooks Mexico had over 1,600 customers

84% of users used QuickBooks as their end to end and only accounting product

User feedback showed an average of 78% less time spent on tasks when using QuickBooks

14% higher multiple task completion rate than the market product average