User Experience with a Capital YOU: Kirsten Thulborn

There may be errors in spelling, grammar, and accuracy in this machine-generated transcript.

Alicia Katz Pollock: In this week's episode of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants Podcast, I am delighted to have a special guest with me, Kirsten Thulborn, who is one of the employees at Intuit, who I talk to regularly, and I met her because she was responsible for the user interface in QuickBooks, and I've had the privilege of meeting with her fairly regularly. So because, like, my [00:00:30] challenge as a creator is that I'll spend hours and hours and hours working on my book. And then literally and this actually happened to me in 2025, I put in like, you know, hundreds of hours on the book and I released it in March. And then literally in May, the interface changed and everything. All the work that I had done in the book was gone. And that has happened to me periodically through the years. And that is kind of the hazard of, first of all, print, but then also being a QBO training content [00:01:00] creator. Um, and so for me, it's always been really important to have somebody at Intuit who I can discuss what I'm up to and help me strategize so that I don't spin my wheels and waste my time. And when I was at Intuit Connect last fall, that was kind of my goal was to find like my new person to talk to. And I was in the, in the innovation circle. And if you haven't been listening to this podcast for too long, we actually have like a series of five episodes going [00:01:30] around all the innovation circle of all the things that I learned there on the floor at the conference. But I ran into Kirsten and we were fast friends. And it's been just, you know, a delight for me over the last few months to talk to her. So I thought I would invite her onto the podcast to get to talk to you. So I would like to call to the floor. Kirsten Thulborn. Hey, how are you?

Kirsten Thulborn: Hi. I'm doing well, Alicia. I'm secretly not so secretly a huge fan girl. So this is like [00:02:00] the coolest thing to. Be able to be here and speak with you on your podcast. I listen to every episode so I. Hear you. I hear you when you say log of feedback or if you say something. We're listening. So I'm just I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So does that mean that every time I make that joke, like, hey, Intuit, if you're listening, you actually are.

Kirsten Thulborn: I am. Yeah, I hear it and I giggle a little. I heard it last night too. I'm like, I know, I know, Alicia. Yeah. [00:02:30] I'm listening.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, good. I'm glad that I kind of have that creative channel for, for submitting feedback and it gets heard in a different way. So yeah, totally, totally appreciate you and appreciate that. Um, so, so what's your title? What's your job title?

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah. Great question. So I am a group design manager at Intuit. I am the design lead for our core financial management services products. So what what does that mean? So I'm in charge [00:03:00] of the accounting app. I'm in charge of the sales tax app and the business tax app in QuickBooks. And most recently I was working and throwing my heart and soul into Intuit accounting suite. So I have a lot of passion and experience with that product as well.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. Excellent. Um, and you know, it's always funny to me when I hear people's titles is I know they make sense internally, but they never make sense to me on, you know, like if you say Intuit accountants wheat, I get it, but [00:03:30] I'll hear like the global design group and or the global business. What is it? What is that? So, um, yeah. Okay. How long have you been with Intuit?

Kirsten Thulborn: I've been with Intuit actually. Next week, eight years. Uh, a long time, but kind of middle of the road tenure for Intuit. We have a ton of people who have been here for 20, 25, 30 years. Um, so yeah, I'm pretty proud. Eight years coming up next week.

Alicia Katz Pollock: What was the first job that you had at [00:04:00] QuickBooks?

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah, the first job that I had, I was hired as a senior designer to work on the In-product help system and the help website. So our knowledge base. So that's, that's where I started. Um, I'd say I've been here for eight years, but I think I've had 5 or 6 different jobs. So after working on internal help system, um, where we also run into a lot of the same problems, keeping the content up to date. So totally feel [00:04:30] you with trying to make sure that everything you're putting out into the world and the other creators are putting out to the world are updated. After that, um, I moved to QuickBooks Live actually, before we launched our very first product, I was on the team when we launched our first 200 customers and started, um, started that journey. From there, I went to work on the Intuit developer group and this is our third party apps and helping our third party developers develop apps for customers to make QuickBooks even more robust, [00:05:00] connected to the vast ecosystem of financial tools that every small business is using. And then from there, it's kind of a history lesson. Then I went to QuickBooks Commerce so we could start solving accounting and inventory problems for product based businesses. And from there, that's where I've landed on one of my favorite teams, the accounting team. I've been leading the accounting team for four years. I have to say it was a steep learning curve without coming from a background of bookkeeping or accounting. [00:05:30] And now I feel I feel like I know, I know what's going on and I'm super excited about it. And yeah, um, that's where also Intuit Accounting Suite came in and the sales tax and business tax, tax apps all, all focused on core financial workflows.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, I like that you've been through a whole number of rows because it really gives you roles because it gives you a complete view of everything happening inside the software.

Kirsten Thulborn: Absolutely. I think it's really important, especially to be responsible [00:06:00] for the accounting workflows and QuickBooks. I think that's that's a huge responsibility that I take on. And I take it very seriously and knowing how all the different pieces of QuickBooks funnel in and funnel out of that experience is mission critical for us to be able to deliver an experience that makes sense and is easy to use.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So what's an example of a typical task that you do in a day?

Kirsten Thulborn: Oh, um, so I lead a team of nearly 20 designers. [00:06:30] Uh, and what we are responsible for in a typical day is I'm, I'm reviewing their design work. So we're working on new features all the time. Actually, a lot of the features and work we do comes from the feedback, the feedback widget where you guys type in what's going on and we fix it. Um, so I will be working with my designers. We open, we use a design tool called Figma. We jump into Figma. That's where we design the interfaces and we review are we are we solving the right [00:07:00] customer problem? Did we solve it in the right way? Is it easy to use? Is it too easy to use? Because there are some things that you shouldn't, it shouldn't be easy for you to change them. Um, so, uh, that's, that's one of the things also making sure across my team that things make sense. Quickbooks is such a vast organization and such a vast and powerful product that if we design something in one way over here and it acts and looks differently over there, we have a problem. So trying [00:07:30] to make sure that we're consistent is another big part of my role day to day.

Alicia Katz Pollock: There's one thing that I've noticed, for example, is that the the save buttons are different in different screens, or that one of the search bars has this really cool set of, of filter features, but the other ones don't. And so I was always wondering, like, is, are things developed in under a whole umbrella or is it individual teams developing? Like, I know that they just started calling them apps. And [00:08:00] then you take each of the individual components and knit them together.

Kirsten Thulborn: Well, that's a, that's a great question, Alicia. Um, and, and my goal, all of our goals, all of the design leader's goals is to make sure that we are always marching towards consistency. So it's possible that, uh, the search bar, some search bar, some search capabilities, you might see that it's leapfrogged the other search capabilities somewhere, but we can just imagine that what will happen in the future is that awesomeness that we've developed and [00:08:30] refined trickles down into all the experiences. But yes, it's, it's a vast organization. There are hundreds of designers working on the products and, and also probably thousands of engineers. And so it takes time for new innovations to trickle down everywhere. However, when it comes to there's, there's bigger things like a search bar and that search functionality, which is quite complex. And then there's buttons in different places. And that's something that the design org is super [00:09:00] focused on fixing and driving consistency right now. And that's something you'll see in the coming months that we're going to make things much more consistent.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Cool. That's, that's really good to know. What do you like about working at Intuit?

Kirsten Thulborn: What I love about working for Intuit is that and I've never I've never experienced this at any other company I've worked at. But when you're in your when you're in a room debating an idea on what we should deliver to our customers, no one in that room [00:09:30] is debating whether it should be their idea or someone else's idea. Everyone is debating to ensure that we deliver on the customer problem. And so we're debating about. Do we agree that that is the right customer problem or that we're solving it in the right way? And for me, that's a treat as a designer because oftentimes if there's not a strong customer focus, customer obsession, culture, I need to put my head in and try to get [00:10:00] the team focused about, well, what about the customer? What is the customer need? The technology is cool, but what about the customer? And at Intuit, the argument is always about what what is the customer need and what is the customer problem. And that's just thrilling because then I can do my best work without having to remind people that we're here for the customer.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Sometimes I wonder, you know, I hear that from into it and sometimes I wonder, well, which customers are they listening to? Because my needs as a customer might be different from somebody else's needs as a customer.

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah, [00:10:30] absolutely. And that's, that's one of the challenges. And I think that's also why what I love about Intuit is we solve for so many different customers. So of course, we have small businesses, we have solopreneurs, we have mid-market businesses, we have bookkeepers, we have accountants, large firms, small firms. There's so many people to solve for. So I can speak to what, um, what my team really focuses on. What we've declared is that the power user is the user that we're going to focus on. And let me describe what that means. We know that [00:11:00] bookkeepers, accountants, firm leaders, the, the people who jump into QuickBooks the same way my team jumps into our design tool every day. The people who know how the complexity works and need to get in there as a power tool get things done quickly. That is what my team wakes up every morning to do, and that's who we solve for. But there are other teams in different parts of the business who are more focused on, on on different users because it's more important for what they're working on.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Somebody who [00:11:30] like a small business owner who is just like a hobbyist signing up for QuickBooks cold is very, very different from somebody like myself and my colleagues who support hundreds of clients. So.

Kirsten Thulborn: Absolutely. And that means you're clicking hundreds of times. And if bulk edit isn't isn't there, then we haven't solved your problem. And absolutely, totally different experiences.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Um, what's one thing that you wish was different? Uh, add into it.

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah. I'm going to need a minute to think here. What [00:12:00] do I wish was different? So one thing my team spends a lot of time on when we, when we design changes and enhancements is we think about whether our customers will ever discover the changes. So sometimes there's some really cool, nuanced power features we put in to the, to the experience, but we don't know if anyone's ever going to discover it. And so I really wish there was an easier way for us to communicate [00:12:30] these changes in a more cadenced pattern. That doesn't include putting more pop ups to tell you that the new feature is there. So for example, we, we have a new feature that I think is really slick. You can drag and drop attachments on the bank feed. Just drag it from your desktop straight onto the line item, straight onto the transaction, and it attaches. You don't have to click anything. It's amazing. But we know that people haven't discovered it, so I wish [00:13:00] there was a way to get get the word out on some of the cool, cool little things we're doing.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I mean, honestly, that's kind of what I feel. One of the things that I bring to the table is I'm always looking for those tiny little nuances and changes. And I even trademarked Look What I found as like a title of my, of my segment on my website and on, in my classes and on the podcast as well. Um, yeah, my suggestion is you got that little notification bell in the upper right hand corner [00:13:30] that is rarely, rarely used. And I would love to see a what's new today? Um, list up there. And so anytime, whether the whether the release is big or whether release is tiny. Even just letting us know that this little thing has been changed. Would I think a lot of people would click on it every morning and then know what to expect so that when they go through their day, they're not surprised or like you said, never discover it at all.

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah, I think that's a fantastic idea. And going through your [00:14:00] day and being surprised, we talk about that a lot internally. Like when, when we're, we're developing goodness, but it's going to require a change to your day or change to your muscle memory, your habits. We, we make those changes with deep discussion and debate, but it still comes down to how do we let you know that it's there and that it was done to help accelerate something without you kind of getting hit in the face with it and, and not having a great time.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Well, [00:14:30] you know, several years ago we had a group called the Intuit Trainer Writer Network that was created by Alison Ball, and that was a whole group of I think there were maybe 200 of us. And that's what we did, is we were those communicators that we would have a meeting. I think it was a monthly meeting. And it kind of like in the note where you guys talk about the new features, but they would like get into the granular detail with us, and then we would spread the word. Like when there were questions on social media, we would answer them, we would write articles about them [00:15:00] and put them out through our own content. And that in a way, it was kind of like the evangelical core, but it really was about product awareness and fostering delight. And I was really sad when they decided to get rid of that program. I think it almost made a disservice to users, because there were 200 people who were on that exact mission of, hey, I found something cool. Let me tell you about it. Yeah, I mean, from [00:15:30] the bottom up.

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah, that I that's that's before my time on the team. But that's yeah, something we have to do something to make it easier because I read the feedback, I read the feedback coming in and the one that hurts me the most, but I don't take it personally because I understand, I understand it's hard when we change things is you must not be talking to accountants. How could you ever do this, launch this. And it just breaks my heart because we we spend so much time on my team making sure we solve [00:16:00] for ProAdvisor and bookkeepers and accountants. Um, and so maybe that's, that's my message here that we care a lot. I care a lot. Um, and we never want our users to, to feel that way. Like we did something and it wasn't for them or we didn't know what we were doing. So.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, you know, you mentioned feedback. You know, that's one of my themes on this show is flood that feedback and put in feedback about [00:16:30] everything. What happens with that feedback. Where does it go?

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah. So each team manages their own feedback channel. And like I mentioned, there's hundreds and thousands of us working on QuickBooks. So I'll speak specifically to what happens when you provide feedback in the accounting app. So we have a couple of different feedback widgets in there on different pages, different parts of the app that gets funneled into, um, into a spreadsheet. And it [00:17:00] actually gets sent out in real time. When this instant you submit a piece of feedback, it gets sent through to us in our slack channel. So we get an alert and we get a notification from there. How do we handle it? How do we manage all that feedback coming in? So the product managers, uh, the designers and the engineers, as well as our customer success partners are the ones who read through it, uh, provide themes, collate it, make sure that if there's a breaking issue that we handle it quickly. Um, [00:17:30] but the goal there is really to figure out is there is there a theme, an ongoing problem? Is there something that we can fix or something we need to rethink because we got it wrong? So all of that feedback is coming in and getting collated. Um, what I love is sometimes, especially on the accounting team, the product managers are so passionate and so dedicated that they will reach out individually to users that left that feedback to see if the issue is still happening, or to [00:18:00] work with them one on one to try to investigate it, because sometimes we don't get enough clarity in the feedback like, oh, this thing is broken. Well, if it's broken, we want to fix it, but we need more information. So that's, that's what happens.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, that's actually happened to me a couple times. And once fairly recently, um, I clicked on the create button and I didn't get a menu and I tried it in incognito and I tried restarting my computer and no menu came up. So I put in feedback about it and somebody actually did call me and [00:18:30] um, and I it, it was on Friday and I didn't try it again until Monday and on Monday it worked. But apparently like, you know, somebody was really, truly paying attention. And I did get personal outreach and that was one that I didn't sign as Alicia because one thing that I do sometimes is I sign my name on them because I figure maybe someday somebody will search and like, what is Alicia actually submit?

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah, yeah. So, so one thing I wish, because there is, there is a special process we need to go through to [00:19:00] reach out to people because we also don't want to bother you. So there are rules about like your communication preferences that maybe you don't want to hear from us. And so the only ask I would have to anyone listening is if you're cool with us reaching out to you or finding out more or spending time with us, let us know that in the feedback and maybe how we can contact you. That would be awesome.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Well, so like, what's your advice for when we do want to submit feedback, because the more feedback we submit, the more we're going [00:19:30] to get our problem solved. So like, what's kind of like the ideal feedback submission.

Kirsten Thulborn: The ideal feedback submission would be, I think the theme here is specific. So we know which feedback tool you entered the feedback into, but we don't necessarily know what you were looking at or what you were doing when you provided the feedback. So something like I was using this screen, trying to do this thing and [00:20:00] this specific thing didn't work as intended. Here's what I was expecting it to do. And if it if it's broken, like the menu wasn't coming up for you being really clear about what happened, but then what was supposed to happen and that's, that helps us out a lot. Um, but for feature requests, like that's, that's the ideal framing for something that's not working for a feature request. Um, similar specificity in when I do this type of activity, there's this issue or this thing that makes [00:20:30] it harder for me. It would be really cool if or you could make my job easier, or you could make my job faster. If I could do this thing, I could bulk select, I could x, y, z. So that's, that would be so amazing if, if we're getting feedback framed in that way.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. I imagine a lot of people will just jump straight to the this isn't working, but not the how did I get here and what am I trying to do piece of it. And if you're going to change it, you would [00:21:00] need to know where it is or how you got there, or what you're trying to do in order to solve for it. And so that's probably like you're getting feedback that's only half useful.

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah, yeah, that's, that is a theme. And we talk about that as a team too. How do we, how do we handle the feedback that doesn't seem to have a theme because we can't quite understand what it's about, But we care deeply and we want to understand. So the specificity really helps.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So it's [00:21:30] where are you? What were you doing? What were you trying to do? What didn't work wrong? And what would you like it to do differently?

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Okay. All right. Awesome. So all of you out there, that's the way to submit feedback. Okay. Not with, you know, give give them the context so that they can actually take action on it. And your contact information, if you want them to reach out to you to then, then put that on there too. Yeah.

Kirsten Thulborn: And even just permission, like letting [00:22:00] us know that we, we can contact you, but we don't have to. It's okay if, if that's not your preference. We know you're really busy. Um, but we love connecting with customers because we often there there's blind spots. It's a huge product, huge user base, just like you said. Alicia. There's tons of different types of users. The more, the more feedback we get from different types of people, the more we can make sure that we're handling all the edge cases that we need to handle.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, that's actually one of the questions that I have for you, is that you've got users [00:22:30] in that whole span of beginners who know zero about bookkeeping at all, all the way up to pro users who do you know, troubleshooting or training. So how do you balance power users who want granular control with new business owners who just want to send an invoice and move on?

Kirsten Thulborn: Absolutely. So it really depends on which part of the product the team is working on. So for, for my core team accounting, our primary user we have [00:23:00] declared is the power user like I referenced earlier. So it's, it's people like you who are going in and you need to do a lot of stuff very quickly with high confidence and high accuracy. If we were designing the bank feed and the accounting app for that small business that just kind of wants to hop in and hop out, it would look very different. In fact, in this in this new world of AI. Maybe, maybe it wouldn't be an interface. Maybe it would be a text thread. Maybe. Who knows? It would be totally different. So [00:23:30] what we want to make sure we do as a principal for my team is we want to be accommodating to power users and focus on the power user without being debilitating to a small business. And the way a small business would be successful is off ramp to their accountant, to finding a ProAdvisor to to an Intuit QuickBooks live experts. So solve for the power user, solve for the accountants and provide help through [00:24:00] through human intervention for the people who who aren't a power user.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I think that's one of the struggles in particular, because some of the feedback that I hear about the new interface is that there's so much on it and it's so cluttered, and there's so many things to look at and how do I know where to go? But it's like that because you're programing for the power user, not for the beginner. And so you kind of need to be all things to all people. Like the days of the Danny DeVito commercials with like, it's so [00:24:30] easy that anybody could do it is really not true. But it's amazing how that concept has stuck in people's heads that, you know, QuickBooks is that thing that you could just sit down and, and start doing and you can't, you have to know bookkeeping and you have to figure out the software in order to get the job done. I mean, I remember that back in 2020, 20, 2021. No, it had to be earlier than that. No, it was 2020, 2021. [00:25:00] Um, you guys released the business interface versus the accountant interface with the brainstorm that you could switch between the simplified interface and the advanced interface, and that that would solve for that problem. But then the problem was that nobody was using the same interface and a bookkeeper would talk to the the, the business user, and they would say, well, go here.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And the owner would be like, that's not a thing. And it caused a bunch of struggle. I remember we in [00:25:30] 2022, they brought together right at the end of Covid, almost like a celebration. They brought together an influencers summit and it was all the, the trainer writers and all the people like doing a lot of social media evangelizing. And we were out in the courtyard. This is actually the day that I met Jim to the same event. Um, but there were a bunch of people sitting around the fire and I was walking by and Hector Garcia yells [00:26:00] out to me and like, the whole group turns and looks and says, hey, Alicia, what do you think of the of the business view? And my answer was, the business of you and everybody bust out laughing across the entire entire courtyard because everybody felt the same way. And then about six months or a year later, it silently disappeared. Although sometimes I still see it on the the gear menu drop down that it still [00:26:30] says switch to business view, but there's no business view anymore.

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah. So, um, that's so funny to hear that history. Alicia. So accountant view and business view, we learned a lot. So we're always iterating, we're always learning. And yeah, the difficulty for accountants and bookkeepers that you don't know what your client is using and they're using something different. And then also maintaining the content for our help articles, our knowledge base incredibly difficult with two interfaces. So [00:27:00] we have almost completely deprecated account view and business view and move forward into this new world with the learnings we have from that. So know that we know every team, every designer knows that you want to have the same interface as your clients, you want to see what they're seeing. And that's actually getting into a lot of our design decisions, like with the collaboration portal, where you can actually ask your client a question about what a transaction was for from the bank feed. [00:27:30] We made the interface that you see exactly the same as what your client is going to see, because we know from account view and business view that you want to see the same thing. Yeah. I'll also say that, um, one of the things that changed the most with account view and business view was the bank transactions page. And we took a lot of the learnings from what people loved about Accountinfo and what small businesses were loving and understanding about the business view.

Kirsten Thulborn: And we put that into the new AI powered [00:28:00] bank feeds. You'll see we changed some of the language. It's no longer ad we, we've, we call it post now. Um, and if I could nerd out with you for a second here about how we chose that word. We knew that SMEs weren't understanding the concept of things being in your books or not in your books. We saw that a lot of SMEs thought that as soon as they connected their bank, everything was in QuickBooks. It was in their books. Like, what's the difference between being in QuickBooks and being in your books? And [00:28:30] so we knew that as we were moving past accountant view and business view, we had to choose a word that was meaningful and correct for accounting professionals, but also meant something and communicated that something was happening, something official was happening. You were posting something to somewhere. It was moving from one place to the other. And that's how we landed on post and pending and Post-It instead of to categorize and or categorized in for review. So [00:29:00] a lot of nerdy design content design work happened to try and bring the confusion into clarity. And so we can move forward. And that's a really good example of how my team solves for the power user without alienating the small business user.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, yeah. I remember actually giving feedback specifically about that terminology maybe ten years ago. And at that point we, we were thinking ad was better because, you know, small business [00:29:30] owners wouldn't understand what post means. But now that I've matured, even in my delivery style, teaching them some accounting terms is not a bad thing. And so it's the accurate term that really and I like what you said that it's the act of posting it. Then they go, oh, this is unposted. I don't know what that means, but this is not a thing until I hit that button. So yeah, I think it's a good change for sure. How do you measure whether a UI change, [00:30:00] an interface change actually does make things better?

Kirsten Thulborn: That's a great question. So at the very beginning of the process when we have these ideas and let's let's change everything to the word post pending and Post-It. Let's try it. We do multiple rounds of usability testing and concept testing. So what. That can take different. We use different research methodologies, different human centered research methodologies to see does this idea hold weight or is it confusing? Or is it making [00:30:30] things harder for anything that we do? Not just content changes, but anything we do, um, in the product. And then once, once we get to a certain level of confidence that it's working, it's making things easier, it's easier to understand. We, we mostly only have qualitative research ahead of a launch. Then we move into quant and continued qual research once it launches. So we continue to do research after a launch with customers to see if [00:31:00] the new experience is making things easier for them qualitatively and if they understand it qualitatively. We also have that feedback tool. That's one of the things we we notice because when we change something, the feedback changes and the type of feedback we're changing. So we monitor that to see if we reach some sort of meaningful grouping of, of themes that something's gone wrong or something's working. And then we also have, uh, usability scoring that we use for our products [00:31:30] that we make sure that we're hitting certain marks and certain standards after a launch.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So like, what are those metrics look like? Can you explain more about like how you, what those measure?

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's, um, it varies depending on what the type of experience is that we're measuring, um, for multi-step experiences, we're always monitoring completion rates. Uh, another thing that we can monitor is how long it's taking to complete a multi-step [00:32:00] process. Are users spending too much time somewhere that we think should be pretty quick. That could indicate that they're getting a little stuck up. Time to completion. Um, like posting a transaction. We're paying a lot of attention of. We're. Excuse me. We're paying a lot of attention to how quickly can you get through your workload and what's taking a while and where are you getting stuck? So, um, depending on what type of experience we might be monitoring [00:32:30] multi-step posting a transaction, it's kind of a single step, but we know some of those transactions are well, maybe it's not a post, it's a match. It's a pair, it's a something else. So, um, yeah, but all of our key workflows in QuickBooks, we, we evaluate and we review with a, with a fine tooth comb to make sure we're doing everything we can do from the design perspective to make it easy to use.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I mean, designers often talk about reducing friction, but friction isn't always bad. I mean, does sometimes [00:33:00] does that friction help prevent mistakes?

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah, I love this question. And yes, absolutely. For example, um, we've debated in the bank feed how easy should it be for a small business owner to add a chart of accounts? Are they just going to create a bunch of charts of accounts accounts? Should we let them do that? But we can't necessarily tell if it's a small business owner or an internal accountant logging in. So we don't want to prevent the [00:33:30] accounting professional from adding a chart of accounts. They know what they're doing, but absolutely certain things should have a certain amount of designed friction, but not everything. And that's where judgment really comes in to figure out what needs to be and what should be easy to do, quick to do, and what what do you need to protect the user from doing that they might not realize they're doing?

Alicia Katz Pollock: Oh, yeah. That's a great thing to like figure out [00:34:00] how to like Use the visuals and the process in order to control that experience. That that makes a lot of sense. And I can see how that would be really challenging. One of the things that's interesting to me is that every time QBO changes, there's always this giant emotional response. Why do you think UI or interface changes generate that kind of emotion?

Kirsten Thulborn: That's such a fair question. I'm just thinking back to the tools [00:34:30] that my team uses. And they did A, the company that releases the design tool we use, did a visual update, changed the interface a year or two ago, and my team was up in arms and I was even upset. And I was upset because there was like a little bit of a gap, like they had made the corners a different radius and changed the spacing. And I it was just different. And it, it was bothered me. I didn't think it was better. But what [00:35:00] I learned, what was interesting is I had accidentally opted myself into the new UI, and I didn't realize you could opt out, but the rest of my team was still opted out, and I eventually forgot what the other interface looked like that they were using, and I just got used to it. But I had a visceral reaction. I think the same thing happens every time there's a new iOS that launches, or a new Android interface like our lives are. Our software tools are constantly changing and [00:35:30] it's disruptive. I'm, I don't know, it might be maybe technology has become such a part of our everyday day to day that any little hiccup really bothers us.

Kirsten Thulborn: Um, one, one thing you could like, one thing I like to explain as an example here is if every day you woke up and your coffee maker was in a different location and the coffee was in a different location, and the coffee filters and the coffee mugs and like an interface change is kind of like that. You woke up in the morning and everything was in a different spot and you [00:36:00] didn't want to put it there. You had it optimized. It was working for you. That's what it feels like. But I think eventually you'd also maybe if you if you had to keep all those coffee items in those places, you'd learn that you get used to it. You'd forget. I think that's the other really interesting about interface changes is that we're all really upset by them and disrupted by them, but we also forget eventually we all forget what it used to look like. And I don't understand that either. I think that's a really interesting concept.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I [00:36:30] use a tool called Snagit for all my screen captures, for all of my articles and writing, and I've been doing this now for close to ten years, and I've got images in my snagit that go back five years now. And at some point I actually want to put together like maybe even a coffee table book of like the same thing with each of the iterations over time of what it looked like to show the evolution of it. And I think that would actually be like a gallery art project to. Yeah, put it all together. Yeah.

Kirsten Thulborn: Like [00:37:00] some of my old some of my old design work. I was looking at some screenshots from like over a decade ago and just I was looking at the iOS keyboard on the iPhone. I was like, wow, I've completely forgot that the iOS interface used to look like this. This is wild. We've come so far. But even though I spent years dedicated to designing things with that interface, I've completely forgotten.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Um, how's AI changing the way that you think about interface design?

Kirsten Thulborn: Oh, [00:37:30] a lot. And I think we're all trying to figure this out. There's, um, there's a couple of different ways that I think AI is changing things for, for us with interface design. The first is we now have the option to ask, should it be a chat interface or could a chat interface, an interactive chat interface? Could that make things faster, easier, better? Um, but we have to ask that question. Should this be a chat interface, like a like a chat GPT or a clot or something like that? [00:38:00] Does it deserve to be so that question still needs to be asked. Does it deserve to be like that? The other thing we're finding is that we can use these tools to produce ideas much faster. So lots of different ideas of how we might solve a certain workflow or a certain problem. We're doing a lot of work right now to try to add little itty bitty enhancements to the chart of accounts. And so the designer on my team who's working on that can come up with five different interactive concepts in an hour or [00:38:30] two, as opposed to maybe like a day or two, if he didn't have the AI tools that could create these interactive prototypes. Um, I still think that all of the basics of human centered design apply, understand your customer, understand their problem, figure out how you want to solve the problem, and then these AI tools can help us solve it faster.

Kirsten Thulborn: I think what I'm really excited about [00:39:00] is that it's not necessarily the chat interfaces, because those are great too. But this new LLM technology can do things that we couldn't do before where you can actually, we can kind of catch a user before they do something wrong. Or we could predict that a couple of things look like this, not might not be right here, for example, in the bank feed. I'm sure you've experienced this, Alicia. It's really hard to get SMEs to understand what matching means and not don't just like go through and post everything because, [00:39:30] you know, you spent that money or earn that money. Things need to be matched. We can identify with this new AI technology that, hey, this don't post like maybe you don't want to post this. We don't have the match yet. Like we necessarily can't recommend the match, but this is this type of thing is usually matched. Do you want to try and find a match? So I think that's super cool that we can do things like that with this new AI technology.

Alicia Katz Pollock: That would specifically prevent the duplicated income [00:40:00] from not matching income and sales receipts and invoice payments. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I found myself yesterday wanting to just tell it, run me a 2025 PNL. And like, I tried typing it into the search bar and the search bar will pull up profit and loss, but it won't do it for last year. And I can go to reports and then standard reports and then find PNL by year. But I was just like PNL for 2025 PNL, and I was just wishing that it would just put it up for me.

Kirsten Thulborn: So yeah, [00:40:30] we're working on it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Oh, good.

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah, yeah. Like, um, what we found is, and I am a small business owner myself, I use QuickBooks, uh, day to day. So I'm in it with you guys is that I've had to use, um, I had some complex bookkeeping I had to do and I use ChatGPT to try and walk me through how to do it in QuickBooks. But the vision, of course, is that QuickBooks has all your financial information about my business. And rather than getting a generic answer [00:41:00] from another tool, can I get a step by step answer about the specific money that QuickBooks sees in my bank feed? And then it was a very manual process. I had to make three different or four different transactions to record the income. Um, can QuickBooks do that for me? And like, that's, that's where we're going. And I think that's really cool.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And I know a lot of people have mixed feelings about it, about, about that AI and introducing that AI into QuickBooks. [00:41:30] You may want to consider having a toggle of AI on and AI off or having a paid tier with the AI, because some people are actually adamantly opposed to it and some people aren't ready for it, and other people are like, oh yeah, give it, give it, bring it now. And so that's something that I've, I've kind of tried to figure out. It's like almost as, almost as big as the business user versus accountant user. Do the people who want the AI and the people who don't want [00:42:00] the AI? And I'd imagine the conversations that you guys are having about that, because I know Intuit is all in on the AI, but that's going to actually alienate some people.

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. This is this is right up there with who are we solving for? Is this for an SMB or is this for a mid-market business? Or is this for an accounting professional? Absolutely. So there's a there's a concept in technology called the technology adoption curve. And it's a bell curve. And if I describe it way out in front of the [00:42:30] bell curve, all the way to the left is what's called the innovators. And these are the people who stand in line at 6 a.m. for the new iPhone. Every single time it comes out. I personally am not an innovator. Um, they're going to jump in and try new things before any work has been done to figure out if it's working or not working, or like, maybe I'll buy the next iPhone, you know? But no, these people want the latest and greatest. All right. And that's what you're mentioning, right? These people are like, give it to me. It's exciting. Let's figure it out. It's okay if it's not perfect. Let's go [00:43:00] the next the next step up. The bell curve is the early adopters, and that's personally where I fit. I want someone else to figure out if it's working or not working. And then if they they say it's good and they get the bugs out, then I'm ready to use it. And eventually all the way at the other end of that bell curve, all the way to the right, the long tail is laggards. And those.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Are the. Before you get into the laggards, can you actually give us the rest of it? So what's after early adopter? I think it would be helpful for people to know where they identify in this process. [00:43:30]

Kirsten Thulborn: After early adopters comes early majority. And this is most of consumers where it's been tried by the early people. The bugs have been worked out, new security patches have been logged for new iOS, etc. and it's becoming more mainstream. Uh, most people have this item. They're comfortable using it, they're buying it. It's it's mainstream. Then comes late majority and that's about the same size group of people, early majority [00:44:00] and late majority about the same size. They're just taking a little bit longer. Maybe they don't have a need for this new technology or this new thing. Uh, and at the very end, we have laggards and those that's just the either they're, they don't know about the new innovation or they're not interested in the new innovation, or it's just not something that's important for their lives. And eventually society might move forward in a sense that now everyone has a smartphone. So these would be the last people that ever got [00:44:30] a smartphone. And now they're kind of ubiquitous. And so that's, that's when they get the technology. Once it's ubiquitous and we're all using it.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Those are the people who are on, on social media complaining that their QuickBooks 2021 isn't working anymore.

Kirsten Thulborn: But maybe, maybe, maybe I see, I see like a lot of value though. I like I really feel for those people though, because when my tools change as a designer, it's really hard. Um, the design, I don't know, I think I've used 5 or 6 different [00:45:00] design tools. There wasn't even a tool dedicated to doing interface design until the past, I think like eight, ten years ago when I started this career, there wasn't a, a tool that everyone in the industry was using that everyone. So I get it. I can, I can relate to the thing that I do my job with changed or I'm being forced to change.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that bell curve [00:45:30] with us because I think for a lot of people that actually kind of helps people identify like, oh, okay, that's why I feel this way, because I am an early adopter or I am a laggard. And then that kind of like now they'll be able to recognize themselves when QuickBooks changes. They'll be like, oh, here's me. Here's why I'm reacting that way. I'm bleeding edge. I'm a laggard, you know? And so yeah, that's actually really helpful to people. Yeah.

Kirsten Thulborn: And, and I want to, I want you said bleeding edge there and I want to double click on that for a second. Bleeding. [00:46:00] One of my employees has a great quote where when you're working on the bleeding edge, the reason it's called bleeding edge is because there will there can be blood. Like it's hard. Yeah, you could get hurt. There's a lot of different like metaphorically, of course, but there isn't a paved path for how this thing you're working on works. Like we're all figuring that out for the first time now. We have a couple of years with this LLM technology. We're getting smarter, but it was all from trial and error and following the scientific method, having a hypothesis of what [00:46:30] we want to do with this, what we think it can accomplish, what value we think it can bring. And then you test it, you learn, you iterate, you get smarter, and you repeat the process.

Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. Now here's here's an interesting question. If you could redesign one core part of QuickBooks from scratch, no legacy constraints, what would it be?

Kirsten Thulborn: It would absolutely be the setup experience. Why [00:47:00] do I say that? It is so critical to get the setup experience correct. And it's also incredibly technical and complex. So you know that when you set up a new QuickBooks account, the chart of accounts gets provisioned. And this will make or break your QuickBooks experience. It is the spinal cord of QuickBooks. And right now that experience is fairly hidden or 100% hidden even, [00:47:30] um, it's, it's probably not transparent that certain questions you answer will provision a chart of accounts for you and that chart of accounts. I mean, how many times have you had to completely change someone's chart of accounts? Start over. Change it. Right. It's not serving. It's not serving users the way we want it to. And we're working on it. But I would love to find a way to redesign the setup experience that doesn't hide the some of these key accounting foundations. [00:48:00] And I think that's the pull and tug between an accounting professional versus a small business. How much information can a small business handle about something like a chart of accounts? And what I've learned over the years through my research is that we don't need to hide the complexity from small businesses. We just need to make it approachable and probably teach them in bite sized chunks. Because the chart of accounts isn't actually impossible to understand. Everyone has used a financial app that [00:48:30] showed all of their income and expenses in a pie chart. Mint used to do this, so if you can find a way to explain this and make it digestible, I think we could have much more success in SMEs getting set up on their own, and less of a mess for accounting professionals to clean up later.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, yeah. And I've noticed that I have noticed that different people get different charts of accounts depending on that onboarding process. And [00:49:00] I've seen it go everywhere from that wild one that was hundreds long that surfaced every single possible option down to nothing but the built in accounts. And I've seen literally everything in between. So that's really interesting that that's kind of what's running through your head.

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah, I would love like success for me. I'd be so proud if we can deliver a set of experience that finds a way to explain what this thing is, what this chart of accounts is, and personalize [00:49:30] it. So we know that putting everything in the book in the chart of accounts isn't going to work. We know that if it's to slim down, they're just going to start adding things. It's not going to make sense. It's going to be a mess. So how do we how do we make sure that as they're setting things up, they understand the chart of accounts, but also the implications for their reporting that they might want to see things in a certain order and that could impact how they do this. So I just, I just think it's a really interesting opportunity. And there's, there's a lot, a lot of work to do there.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, [00:50:00] um, all right, so I've got one more question for you. Um, what's a moment when you saw a small business owner use something that you designed and thought, yes, that's why we do this.

Kirsten Thulborn: I love this question. It's a very distinct moment, uh, in my career at Intuit. Um, while I was working on the QuickBooks commerce team, we wanted to bring all of this inventory management and product based accounting, um, functionality [00:50:30] into QuickBooks for the first time ever, because QuickBooks historically has hasn't. That's not functionality we've had. And I remember I designed some screens so that the users could see all of the money coming in from their third party applications where they're selling their goods, Etsy, Shopify, eBay, that sort of thing. And I remember I had gotten some internal feedback that it looked like a business analyst had designed the experience. [00:51:00] And I really took that to heart because I was trying to design something that was beautiful, easy to use. Um, but then it got into the hands of a customer and the woman literally shrieked with delight when she saw it. We had like, made her wildest dreams come true that all of the information came in from Shopify in the right places. Both her sales, her fees, everything just made sense and she no longer had to do all the homework she was [00:51:30] doing to try to get that bookkeeping done and that like, I'll remember that that moment forever when she just shrieked with happiness.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And that really is why we do this. That's really what it is all about in the end is, you know, Intuit's got that. The premise of delight, you know, that's what into its goal is. It's one of its mission statements is that people experience delight. And that's kind of how I see [00:52:00] my role in helping make sure that Intuit is delighting us. So thank you for all the hard work that you do and, you know, keeping the user experience, um, top of mind that it's not and reassuring. And, and this conversation was great because I think it really reassures people that it's not just intuit having wild ideas, it's really customer focused and customer based, and it's up to us to make sure that we keep telling you what we need and [00:52:30] so that you guys can listen.

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah. It's been such a pleasure. Like I said, I'm such a fan girl. Um, I listen to your podcast, every single one of them. Uh, and I just, I really, this has been so fun to be able to feel like I'm getting a little bit closer to the accounting community and really let them know, like we're listening, we're doing our best and like, we're everything we do is literally for you. We wake up, we come to this job, we solve problems so that you can wake up, go to your job and have an easier time. So thank [00:53:00] you so much, Alicia.

Alicia Katz Pollock: You're very, very welcome. And thank you for giving us that insight into what it's like from the from the other end.

Kirsten Thulborn: Yeah, absolutely.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So this is Alicia Pollock from Royal Wise and.

Kirsten Thulborn: Kirsten Thulborn from Intuit.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And we will see you in the next one

Kirsten Thulborn: See you in the next one.