CONTENT DESIGN
Intuit Confirmations Pattern
Creating a framework for the Intuit Content Design System
the challenge
How it all began
The Misadventures of Misleading Confirmations, the story of how a problem caught Scott Joaquim (brilliant senior content designer)’s eye and the solution we concocted to combat it...
How it all began
The Misadventures of Misleading Confirmations, the story of how a problem caught Scott Joaquim (brilliant senior content designer)’s eye and the solution we concocted to combat it...
Delete… Toby?! Surely Intuit can’t be condoning cancel culture, especially not in the context of employees at a workplace.
We came, we saw, and we were undone. Apparently, confirmation dialogs across Intuit products were collected from the ends of the earth–eclectic at best, befuddling at worst. Language and looks alike came in all shapes and sizes.
Enough inconsistency! We set out to establish standards and add a pattern to the design system.
Process
1. AuditScott and I flipped through Intuit products, looking them up and down, starting with QuickBooks, then moving on to Mailchimp, Mint, and TurboTax. Click on stuff, trigger confirmations, take screenshots and add them to the library.
2. Research
No need to reinvent the wheel here. We studied content style guides across the industry.
3. Proposal to Style Council
Thanks to Content Architect Sarah Mohs and squad, Intuit’s procedure for amending the style guide is a smooth process. First up: submit a proposal.
4. Rounds of edits
Shout out to our content design team for their valuable feedback. Incorporate, iterate, and smooth out the rough edges.
5. Meet with Style Council
The guardians of the content design system, representing all corners of the Intuit-sphere, judged our final draft.
Voilà
6. The finished productThe guardians then let it all go live at contentdesign.intuit.com.
Done and delivered
7. Socialized to partnersThe aftermath of publishing includes evagelism, of course. I workshopped with the QuickBooks Advanced product designers on figjam, part “step into the shoes of your crossfunctional partner,” part test to see how well these guidelines fly even outside the safety of content walls.
8. Clean sweep opportunity
Lo and behold, a few months later, Fix-It Day (our org’s quarterly event for engineers to tackle low-hanging fruit) popped up themed “user control.” We couldn’t have asked for a more perfect platform to pitch our newly published guidelines.
Mission: distill word-heavy framework for content designers down to 2 grokkable slides for a non-writer audience.
