HARMONY INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

AUG 2013

As part of project Harmony, an effort to bring Intuit's small business offerings together under the brand QuickBooks, I worked on rebuilding the app's information architecture from the ground up. We explored a variety of structures and organizations before landing on a final recommendation.

Architecture Concepts

The QuickBooks application is a powerful tool that helps small business owners stay on top of their accounting, taxes, and payroll. It also helps them accomplish important tasks like sending invoices and paying bills. We explored 3 key concepts for how to organize information so that customers could quickly get to the things that mattered to them most.

PRESSURING TESTING

For each IA concept, we needed to pressure test the design against the main and sub pages in the architecture. Since some architecture meant new landing pages, we needed to determine whether these pages would be valuable or just burry important information one click further into the architecture.

USER TESTING

One of our key questions for customers was how related they felt payroll and taxes were. Would customer prefer to handle payroll taxes in the context of paying employees and sales taxes in the context of sales transactions or would they rather make all of their payments to the government all at once? After talking to six participants, the overwhelming preference was to handle taxes separately all at once.

FINAL Design

In the final design, we kept the top level nav primarily people-centric and grouped related transactions and banking tasks together. We broke taxes out of payroll and created a new tax center for customers to manage payments to the government all in one place.