Inside the UX obsession that brought Harmony to Intuit

I sat down for lunch in New York a few weeks ago hoping Intuit co-founder Scott Cook would reveal all, but I hadn’t expected him to start talking about the time he and his wife went skinny-dipping.

There was a point to this story, of course. While he and his wife were enjoying themselves, almost all their clothes (and their rental car keys) got washed away in a sudden wave. “There were only a few things left. She was able to get into her swim suit, and I was able to squeeze into her pants,” he recalled with a laugh. But things got better almost immediately once they walked to a phone, because his wife had memorized a special number on the rental car’s keychain. “So I know she’s good with numbers.”

Scott Cook, Intuit

And yet, as the story goes, it was Cook’s wife who served as the catalyst for the creation of Intuit. Like many women, she managed the household expenses but her frustrations in balancing the books led Cook to wonder why someone hadn’t created a decent home accounting program to help. That germ of an idea begat Quicken, but the story didn’t end there.

As Cook looked at the user feedback surveys of where Quicken was used, he kept seeing data that suggested it was being run in offices. “That didn’t make sense, because it wasn’t designed for businesses,” he said. It turned out that in many companies, however, Quicken was a lot easier and more pleasurable to use for business accounting than existing products, so Intuit took advantage of the opportunity and developed QuickBooks. In both cases, user frustration was solved by a solid user experience design, one that has expanded from the desktop to a hosted version online.

I came to New York to see how Intuit was continuing to evolve in this area, hoping to see some ideas that other UX designers could use. Just a few months ago, the company launched the latest version of QuickBooks Online, the code-name for which was “Harmony.” These kinds of redesigns can be dangerous for companies to do, but I was intrigued by the new layout, which brought common tasks under a box-like navigation near the top that reminded me of Google’s recent interface update. A series of status updates about various transactions and account activity looked a little bit like Facebook.

Some might call these mere cosmetic changes, but they speak to something I think has made Intuit successful. Cook told me he’s been trying to treat Intuit like a 30-year-old startup, restructuring to make decision-making more fluid and adopting “lean startup” principles for its operations. What may make Intuit last another 30 years, however, is continuing to focus on (and have the courage to constantly rethink) the UX of its products. In that sense, it’s the startups that may have more to learn from Intuit than the other way around.

It’s also about thinking about your products early on as less of a proprietary masterpiece, the way some Canadian startups do, and more like a platform or operating system on which third parties like developers or even customers could add improvements and create value. That may mean a more complex UX journey, and Cook told me this has been a big culture shift at Intuit, but he said it comes down to asking yourself this question: “What makes you think you know how to solve every problem better than them?” And then be prepared to face the naked truth.