Services
Accessibility best practices, competitive analysis, experience auditing, content guidelines, design systems, writing
Overview
I saw an opportunity to respond to a common customer and designer need that dates back to at least 2022 when I joined the Intuit team. In 2024, I sought to answer this question for the Intuit design community: “Do we have a standard on how we address ‘required’ for form fields?”
The potential customer impact was tremendous: Required fields appear at critical moments in a customer’s journey. Having a robust way to handle them can make or break a customer’s experience when they set out to do critical tasks, whether making a purchase or filing for taxes. For customers, having an effective way to handle required fields has the potential to increase usability, accessibility, and satisfaction, and reduce time spent on task completion. For the business, it has the potential to reduce drop-off rates and increase conversion.
I raised my case to the Intuit design system team and content council and gained their support to pursue this. I kicked off work on required field guidelines in January and launched in April 2024, publishing guidelines geared toward designers and developers at contentdesign.intuit.com.
As part of my process, I researched best practices across competitors and industry resources, got the input of 40 experts across Intuit-wide business units, wrote the guidelines, and worked with the content council to publish them. In the first 6 months after publication, the guidelines were viewed almost 2,000 times by 1,200 unique viewers.