How do you fix a product that scaled by helping users make mistakes?

Problem

Customers were unable to pull data into QuickBooks and reconcile it accurately. Users were frustrated by the differing approaches to the same actions and surprised by many errors in their top-level business numbers. Accountants were reporting that the data in QuickBooks often required tedious clean up of duplicates and unreconciled transactions. I was tapped to review and own changes to the entire experience.

Core tension

Our system was not quite as smart or simple as it appeared to users. Duplicates were quickly compounding. We urgently needed to put up guardrails, fix the root cause, and support reconciliation.

Near-term focus

Recreating the core infrastructure and creating new tools would take significant time and serious design work to get right. In the meantime, we had a team ready to act fast and slow the bleeding.

Aligning on design principles

There were many internal experts with strong opinions about how all of this should actually work. I led a series of workshops to capture and align on design principles.

A concept to aim for

This process inspired strong ideas for improvement. I created a concept flow to visualize the ideal experience, where data would appear alongside its relevant context in the product, no longer siloed in a separate review area.

Proposed system vision

I also proposed a system where users would be walked through a series of simple questions and pointed to the correct next step. Users loved this simple direction in user testing sessions, and there were no concerns from stakeholders about the approach, but it would take some time to build the infrastructure. In the meantime, many users already had accounts full of duplicates and unreconciled transactions that needed addressing now.