Scaling clarity across a product ecosystem

Company: Intuit | Role: Senior Content Designer

Screenshots of confirmation modals from Intuit products

(Poor Toby!)

Challenge

Make confirmation modals consistent so they make sense at a glance.

Soon after moving to Intuit’s product world, I was working on a confirmation dialog for a delete action in QuickBooks. I was sure our amazing content design system already had guidelines for this common pattern. But no! Not yet.

So, I sifted through QuickBooks and other Intuit products to see if there was a consistent treatment. The answer: Nope! The content and visuals were all over the map, which put an unnecessary cognitive load on our customers as they journeyed through our products.

Around the same time, I became an official “Buddy” to an awesome content designer and new hire, Christine Yoo. Contributing to the style guide would be a great first project to do together.

 

Solution

Establish content guidelines to bring about consistency.

Our approach

  • Audit: Rounded up as many confirmation modals as we could across all major products.

  • Industry research: Studied the public style guides of other companies, including Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Shopify. We also read up on relevant research and guidance from the Nielsen Norman Group and experts on Medium.

  • Draft, review, repeat: Captured guidelines that reflected both the industry consensus and our notions of what would work best for Intuit. We ran everything by our immediate teammates, got great feedback, and submitted a proposal to the Intuit style council. Then came more feedback! The content community offered all kinds of great suggestions. After a few rounds of revision and geeky debates, the final draft was approved and ready for primetime. You can see the entire entry on the content design site.

 

Outcome

Successful socialization and adoption.

Soon after the guidelines were published, our org announced it would have a “Fix-It Day” where product managers and engineers fix usability issues. Christine and I seized the moment! We realized the style guide entry was pretty heavy for non-content-designers. So, we condensed it into a couple of handy slides. Our partners used them to improve a bunch of confirmation modals in QuickBooks on the big day. 

After that, Christine and I moved on to other projects and didn’t get a chance to find out how often the style guide entry was being used or if there was a measurable uptick in consistency. Hopefully our contribution has made these key moments of decision easier to process for customers.

“Because of you, anyone writing content will have clear guidance on when and how to write confirmation messages that best serve the customer. Thanks for making our site better!”

Sarah Mohs, Principal Content Architect and lead of Intuit style council