Summary

What
At the intersection of the QuickBooks communication and visual design strategy, lives the Message Classification Framework. A communication design framework used to inform the execution of messaging use cases. The goal of the framework is to achieve experience design excellence in every single communication touchpoint between QuickBooks and our valued customers.

My role

• Design lead / manager: Drive execution of the MVP experience through others
• Co-creator and evangelist: Drive and define the strategy and framework
• Contributor: Strategy and framework design execution

Partners

• Product design - Content
• Product design - Visual
• Product management - Platform
• Product development - Platform scrum team

Deliverables 

• Design strategy and framework
• QuickBooks design system documentation​

• In product notifications (MVP) experience design (web)​

Design strategy and framework

The framework is composed of three key pieces, each with it's own specific role:

Content family
Content families inform channel usage to ensure content by channel remains relevant to our customers. Content families are agnostic of marketing or product-based use cases and solve only for providing QuickBooks customers with the right message at the right time and in the right place

Message type
Messages are categorized in to "types" and assigned specific visual attributes in order to be recognizable across touchpoints and use cases

Criticality / prominence
Criticality is the level of urgency on a scale from: non-urgent to business blocking. Prominence determines how how contextual or interruptive a message will be.

Invoice saved
Content family: To get work done
Message type: Confirmation
Criticality: Neutral
Prominence: Low

Funds are ready
Content family: To get work done
Message type: Needs attention
Criticality: Needs attention
Prominence: High

Guided tour
Content family: To get work done
Message type: Neutral
Criticality: Neutral
Prominence: High

Notifications MVP

The MVP chosen to bring this framework to life was the in-product notifications feature for QuickBooks Online. With the framework for categorizing messages in to families in place, it was easy to set up the guard rails for in product notifications. For good measure, we established principles for in-product notifications best practices. 

​Use case example: New product or feature release
Content family: To get work done
Message type: Neutral
Criticality: Neutral
Prominence: High

Design systems documentation

Robust design system documentation was needed in order to scale this framework across many product teams. I partnered with the central design team to review, approve, and publish the documentation to our internal design systems repository. To this day, this messaging framework is used as a starting point and handy reference for any designer seeking to solve for a messaging use case. 

What I learned

Design execution

• When delivering a framework that informs how to approach a design problem — won't necessarily be a consumer or design peer. Something like this needs to be low effort to parse​​ by internal customers of any function.
• When driving execution through others, understand what is truly critical to the success or failure of the feature.

Influence

• When evangelizing a new system, tune the content for the audience. For instance, tailor the content for an executive overview differently than that of design systems team shareout.
• ​It's ok to iterate or start fresh based on feedback from trusted stakeholders, the narrative and content will continue to improve with each iteration. Just know when to call it!

Design strategy

• When in doubt, break out customer problems to help drive focus. This will help us avoid conflating topics and / or diluting success criteria​
• Don’t over think it. It's incredibly easy to solve past the point of diminishing returns. Be exhaustive in my thinking but uncompromisingly narrow in execution