2023-2024

Revamping the developer portal to facilitate the linking of customer accounts to their respective financial institution accounts

Overview

Intuit’s customers are looking for convenient ways to establish a seamless connection with their financial institutions, such as banks and investment accounts. They rely on Intuit’s array of products to efficiently oversee their finances, including tasks like filing their taxes effortlessly.

For these accounts to be available to them, the backend connection engineers work for many months to develop a new connection to the financial institution, for example Bank of America clients want to start adding their bank accounts on Intuit. For that, the developers have to create the connections to the bank data and security systems to allow Intuit customers to add their Bank of America accounts securely on the Intuit platform.

I dedicated my time and effort to developing IDX Studio, a cutting-edge platform designed to streamline the integration onboarding and management of various financial institutions. By centralizing these operations, the platform not only enhances the efficiency of developers but also serves as a unified hub for initiating and concluding the onboarding process. This includes comprehensive testing and seamless implementation across both pre-production and production environments.

Timeline

4 months

Skills

Interaction design

Storytelling

Persona development

Developer experiences

Team

Myself

Junior designer

Engineering manager

7 engineers

Intuit customers want more financial institutions

With more new banks and financial apps and services in the market, Intuit customers want more options to connect their third party apps and services on Intuit to manage all their finances through Intuit products.

This means that Intuit developers have to continue to work on onboarding new financial institutions on the Intuit financial data platform by using developer portal and other internal tools available internally. This process would take about 8 months and include use of multiple platforms and tools causing frustrations and delays with the financial institution’s onboarding process.

“I am a financial institution integration developer trying to connect a provider to Intuit but I do not have the domain knowledge for the entities that the provider supports and even If I do it takes me months to connect because I do not know how to get the knowledge and Intuit tools and processes are disconnected which makes me feel frustrated.”

Current metrics

> 3 months to onboard new types of providers 
2 months to onboard Investment providers

Developer Problem Statement

What developers used to see

Multiple processes across different tools and systems to access the right data and test onboarding configurations before releasing them to pre-prod and prod.

The problems faced by developers includes:

  1. Multiple tools to create single connection

  2. No education or resources available

  3. No identified start or end point of process

  4. Managing releases is on separate tool

  5. Testing is on separate tool

  6. Too many requests to onboard new apps and financial institutions

The new IDX Studio will be a single place to onboard and manage financial institution’s connections

Documentation/education

Providing more education on the process and expected outcomes.

Team view

Managing roles and access on team members to ensure right people have access to the processes.

What does IDX Studio entail?

Simplified onboarding process

All steps to onboard a new financial institution will happen in one place.

Testing

Create testing processes within the same tool to ensure end to end process and efficiency.

Starting with developer needs

Developers are the key personas and I worked with the product team and a researcher to focus on the following principals.

Financial institution’s maintenance requests

Financial institutes like banks have scheduled down time, the Intuit developers are informed of this downtime and need to prepare their products and Intuit customers to give them the right info when they try to connect or access third party accounts.

Connection Testing

This tool allows developers and PMs to conduct ad-hoc testing on connection capabilities, this tool can live standalone or can be combined with onboarding process.

Configuration set up and testing

This tool allows developers and PMs to conduct ad-hoc testing on provider capabilities, this tool can live standalone or can be combined with onboarding process.

Design for the least tech savvy user

Design for developers with varying levels of technical knowledge, including those unfamiliar with certain concepts or processes.

Use of consistent patterns and colors

Establish cohesive design patterns and ensure consistent implementation of the platform's look and feel.

Developers deserve delight

Enhance user experience by incorporating illustrations and micro animations to bring joy to users who are expected to work on a highly serious implementation.

I worked on ensuring that standardized patterns are used by redlining and working with design system experts.

Max width - SM (720px)
Form view - container size - 720px, 20px padding both sides, workable area 680px

Adding a new financial institution

I worked on mapping the end to end flow with updated patterns to ensure all the screens are consistent. Here is a look at the flow and some of the screenshots from library.

But the complete flow was extremely long and complicated causing more confusion while viewing it so I worked on creating ideal state flows with user personas to ensure solid storytelling.

I worked on delivery of the following features, here is a quick snippet of the work delivered which is currently live in production.

Impact of work

Developer productivity

The new IDX Studio has reduced the time needed to onboard a provider from 8 months to ~2 days.

Future of provider onboarding

Intuit wants to externalize this feature so that third party financial services teams can contribute their apps and services to Intuit products. This is the first experiment which will help the product team define externalization requirements.

Lessons learned

Development and design in parallel

Since this project is fully staffed with PD resources, we are designing and developing at the same time which is changing how I approach design.

Developers are tough customers

Developers tend to assume that everyone using the product is at the same technical acumen level as them which makes it much harder to design for nontechnical external users.

Building alignment across stakeholders is key

Lots of cooks in the kitchen problem, we have SMEs and developers who are users building this product which means a lot of quick iterations to get to an aligned MVP.