Design Lead
The Brief
At Intuit Labs, I led design for a portfolio of experimental products aimed at radically simplifying financial tools for small business owners and individuals. Working inside the company behind TurboTax and QuickBooks, I focused on stripping complexity down to its essential core — making the hardest financial moments feel manageable.
The Problem
Small business owners spend an average of 120 hours per year on taxes. The tools meant to help often make it worse — dense interfaces, financial jargon, and workflows designed for accountants, not people.
The Labs mandate was clear: find the 10% of functionality that serves 90% of users, and build that with ruthless focus. Everything else is noise.
What We Built
Designed a flow where small business owners could file quarterly taxes in under 4 minutes by connecting bank data directly to pre-filled forms.
Built a visual cash flow dashboard that surfaced the 3 numbers every small business owner actually needs — money in, money out, and what's coming.
Rewrote the interaction layer across two products to eliminate jargon — replacing financial terminology with plain, direct language throughout.
Cut onboarding time from 40 minutes to 8 by removing all fields that could be auto-populated or deferred until they were actually needed.
Impact
50M+
Intuit customers worldwide
↓ 80%
Onboarding time reduced
4 min
Tax filing time in pilot product
Complexity is easy. Simplicity is the hardest design problem there is — and financial tools are its greatest test.
Design Philosophy
Financial anxiety is real. When someone dreads opening an app, the design has already failed. At Intuit Labs, the goal wasn't to make accounting tools — it was to make them disappear. The best financial product is one that handles the hard parts silently, and only surfaces what matters.