Having worked at Intuit, I'm always amazed at the number of people that look at how crap Quickbooks is and think that beating them is a matter of just making better software. There's some really important psychology that most competitors completely miss.
First, Quickbooks is frequently not chosen directly. Many, many small businesses choose their bookkeeper first and use whatever they use. One trick Intuit uses both in Quickbooks (bookkeepers) and TurboTax (CPAs) is to put a lot of effort/money into focusing on those relationships knowing that they have a huge indirect impact on acquiring and keeping customers.
Second, the fact that Quickbooks is so awkward and inconsistent to use isn't a UI problem, it's a feature. This is an important lesson in designing software that people use for their jobs. When you make elegant, intuitive software that almost anyone can use in short order, it stops being an impressive item to put on a resume. And it stops being a barrier to entry for competing professionals. Software like Quickbooks that's hard to use correctly becomes a selling point for bookkeepers and almost accomplishes the same purpose (though to a lesser degree) than professional licensing organizations...it limits the competition and keeps the rates they can charge high.
So many Quickbooks competitors have failed to knock them off their perch by not realizing that their customers aren't really their target audience and what should be their target audience doesn't want easy.
If I may, your point is exactly what the taxi drivers in NYC were making about Uber et al.
Still I think there is a misunderstanding on the concept of difficulty here. When the first Quickbooks version came out there were probably not many intuitive bookkeeping software. People/SMB/Accountants loved Quickbooks. And then there were demands to add more features. Now Intuit could either redesign the flow and ask people to re-learn or just tack it on with another new page. Guess what? Most people are resistant to change and learning, especially enterprise level. They are more about saving their jobs and asses than efficient process and software. So, Intuit just tacked on the feature and called it a day. All parties were happy - Intuit making money out of a low effort solution and users being happy of not having to re-learn everything.
But...there is a problem here and Intuit is stuck in a bad place. As newer breed of SMB/Accounts etc get into the market they will be frustrated by how the software behaves. It will take couple of newbies, even maybe someone on this very thread, who grow up into well-known CPA or bookkeepers etc to reverse the tide. And Intuit will go the RIM way, not knowing what hit them because their customers will always say that the difficult to use software is the best. Or even Oracle's way, scrambling to introduce a quickbooks for the newer generation, so to speak.
> They are more about saving their jobs and asses than an efficient process and software.
the less cynical view is that moving from a known process to an unknown one presents costs, and the movement could actually result in a less efficient process.
The inverse of this is always trying to move to the most efficient thing all the time, in which case you're going to spend all your time trying to "upgrade" your process, and losing the time too that coordination. You are supposed to do this for your core compentencies! Always improve the things that need improving! But you know what? Most companies don't have book-keeping as their core competency. Book keeping is a thing a company does just like brushing your teeth is a thing you do. When was the last time you optimised your toothbrushing process?
The role of book-keepers and accountants isn't just about "be efficient at accounting", it's almost more about making sure all of this happens transparently to the rest of the company in an efficient way. If you find some thing that cuts the accounting work in half but you have to inform 20k employees on changes, you've just introduced a lot of work for something that (if you're improving all the time) will change soon anyways!
The lesson is that if you're making software you need to actually make people's jobs easier in the entire context and not just optimize on some technical metric. The reality is most people in these roles are overworked, and this accounting software won't mean you don't need an accountant just like Word doesn't make you not need a lawyer. Until it _does_ mean this of course.... but for the most part you need to actually make something that helps people without generating more work.
I have sometimes worked with accountants, overworked ones too, and agree to the larger point that change in processes are painful and costly. My experience has been that accounting law changes nearly every year. And, I find that instead of doing it right, most of them tend to go for the easier option - add a page. Now, this eventually means the software is heavier and cumbersome to use. So, year-over-year software is just adding to the cost of teaching a new person how to use the software while avoiding the cost of changing a process.
Hence the need to write an optimized software. It seems that not many fields have a concept similar to technical debt.
I fully agree with your first point. However, I don't think Quickbooks purposefully designed their software to be hard to use. I think that just happened when they grew their software organically without spending much effort and rework with good UX designers.
It's more important that B2B "work" software works accurately, correctly and ticks all the required features, than that it is intuitive or beautiful. A steep learning curve is a problem for B2C software, not so much for B2B software that is used intensely.
They may not have purposefully designed it originally, but they purposefully keep it hard to use now.
Internally, they have Quickbooks training courses that new employees and employees who work on other products can take. When I took the course, I asked why deleting a transaction was a completely different UI interaction from deleting a contact in QBO. Both pages were, at their core, list widgets so both should share UI, right? But, I was told, they'd done UX tests with experienced users who had strong reactions to making UI interactions like that consistent.
The problem isn't lack of good UX designers. When I was there, they hired Frog design to completely rethink many of the UI interactions. This was in addition to many talented UI/UX people that work on the product full time. It's a product that brings in billions of dollars a year...the resources are there to fix it. But the problem is an existing product and a user base that's resistant to change and one that views their proficiency in the product as an achievement that they'd like competing bookkeepers to also have to attain.
This is strongly embedded in the accounting culture (CPA, in particular tax preparation business): I want every man, woman and child to understand how close we are to chaos. I want everyone to remember why they need us!
> But, I was told, they'd done UX tests with experienced users who had strong reactions to making UI interactions like that consistent.
Had they strong reactions to those being consistent (and thus easier to learn), or did they have strong reactions to those being different from what they were used to?
These guys aren't a Quickbooks competitor. They use Quickbooks online to do their customers' bookkeeping. They're a technology-enhanced service business.
I really hope you weren't a product manager at Intuit.
>Second, the fact that Quickbooks is so awkward and inconsistent to use isn't a UI problem, it's a feature. This is an important lesson in designing software that people use for their jobs. When you make elegant, intuitive software that almost anyone can use in short order, it stops being an impressive item to put on a resume. And it stops being a barrier to entry for competing professionals.
A good professional product does not have "awkward or inconsistent" UI. It has consistent, useful UI that can expand as user's sophistication grows. i.e. it has a learning curve
The curve for learning an "awkard and inconsistent" UI you highlighted is useless and a detriment to SMB's everywhere. A proper SMB accounting approach would to have standard patterns for doing simple accounting with the ability to grow and extend as sophistication of your org grows.
I was a dev manager for a team that was working on a Quickbooks-adjacent product. I had a lot of meetings with core Quickbooks teams and met many of their PMs. They are, for the most part, really good at their jobs.
Your comment comes off as incredibly naive. It's the same naivete that I had before seeing the internal perspective and it's what my comment was addressing. There are psychological phenomena in play that make an existing, market dominant piece of software more successful and harder to displace when it's objectively harder to use when that software forms the basis for someone's job.
And it's important to realize this because this is counterintuitive to what those of us that create software for a living have been taught. We're taught to think like you. We're taught to make software that delights our users and is as easy as possible to use. But understanding a specific set of circumstances when that approach is destined to fail can be important.
>There are psychological phenomena in play that make an existing, market dominant piece of software more successful and harder to displace when it's objectively harder to use when that software forms the basis for someone's job.
For the record and from the GP's context, I'm going to assume by 'harder' you mean 'difficult to use UI'.
I'd assert 'difficult to use UI' is the incorrect type of 'hardness' or 'difficulty' that should be present in an enterprise piece of software. Mainly because fighting a UI is non-value add to the goal of the user. The user's goal, in this case is to manage their books.
Because of this tension of QB _purposefully_ being at odds with the user goal, I'd expect start-ups and new software products to gobble up QB market share over time. If this is the case, all QB can do is make it more difficult for current users to switch off them (.QBW file extension?) as their market share slowly dwindles and their channel sellers slowly disappear.
Good 'difficulty' should come from the learning curve it takes to master (i.e. accurately, quickly, and reliably) the task at hand.
FWIW I'd expect purposefully building difficult-to-use products has many negative externalities for the company culture and this would be a big red flag for any future Intuiters.
You're still not getting it. A Bookkeeper's goal isn't to keep the books. That's their product, but they have their own small business that has more fundamental goals. Accounting software that's easy to use makes it easier to keep the books, but it runs counter to that more fundamental goal of running a successful small business. You're right that there are negative externalities. Small business accounting costs more than it needs to and, by extension, small businesses need to charge customers a bit more. But the people deciding which accounting software to use are the ones benefiting from that negative externality, not the ones paying for it. And as a software vendor, you always target decision makers over users or you go out of business.
I don't think anyone is misunderstanding your point, I just think its ridiculously backwards. It's the equivalent of the government breaking roads so they can create jobs fixing those roads.
If software can simplify bookkeeping and make the profession obsolete, and you deliberately make your software in a way that keeps that inefficiency at play...you guys are gonna wake up one day and realize you spent all your time serving the bloated middleware instead of the true end user, and your market will evaporate before you know what happened....
We get that from a short term perspective, it may make sense to keep it too complicated for the end users, but efficient markets will prevail short of forced intervention.
If that is how Intuit thinks, I cannot wait for the day when they get displaced.
Yes, it's ridiculously backwards. But it's reality. Intuit, at various times, has tried to make the kinds of changes you guys are suggesting. And every time they've run smack into reality and had to backpedal. Reality is like that...you can try to deny, and fail, or accept it and adjust your thinking. It isn't a how Intuit thinks issue, it's the way their customers think after decades of getting comfortable using Intuit software.
Another example...Intuit has wanted to transition customers away from the desktop version of Quickbooks for many years now. If you think Quickbooks online has it's learning curve, just spend some time using the desktop product. It's a maze that takes years to learn to navigate and many of the "features" are horribly buggy from years of neglect. But pry it from their cold, dead hands Intuit cannot, so you can still buy new versions of Quickbooks Desktop.
That's why what you guys are saying is so ridiculous. You're denying a reality in a field you're not familiar with. You're saying something should be different because it's inefficient or other industries work differently. But you haven't done the user research. You don't have decades of experience dealing with the people who actually spend money on the software. You're in no position to critique the way that Intuit thinks.
> And every time they've run smack into reality and had to backpedal.
I am all for being brutally aware of reality...but, there is also a time horizon to these things. Most great startups had to break through resistance. Maybe the resistance you guys saw was simply resistance to change...
Maybe tweaks to UI isn't what wins this game...maybe its tools like Pilot or services like bench, or maybe its something like the car solving the horse manure problems of the turn of the century...
And to be fair, there are some studies that show cognitive strain being linked to better focus or something like that (Disclaimer: I have no idea what im talking about, but am pretty sure Thinking Fast and Slow discusses it.) so, maybe a harder UI is better...
What I do know is that I want software to make my life easier and more efficient. And I don't mind if that takes away part of a means of my livelihood, I'll figure out the next step the same way I got to where I am today.
If I understood you correctly, the folks in charge of this are very good at their jobs and I am sure they are optimizing for their quarterly earnings, or bonuses, or whatever else they are incentivized to do...and I get the idea that they see bookkeepers as their customers, not business owners, and are serving them as best they know how...
but this feels like the lazy way out of innovating.
- government managers are evaluated on budget and headcount because the core services they provide are hard to measure. Thus they don’t want new software to help them be more efficient, unless the alternative is catastrophic, visible failure to provide their service.
- Lawyers charge by the hour. They don’t want new software to dramatically reduce the time spent in discovery. Then they would have to bill for outcomes (cases won) and there are too many things out of their control.
Basically nobody wants to charge for value, because value is hard to quantify accurately and quickly. You wind up showing costs to prove value, so nobody wants to reduce costs.
> government managers are evaluated on budget and headcount because the core services they provide are hard to measure.
That’s... untrue. Government managers are judged (in terms of evaluation of job performance) largely on minimizing both costs and negative public attention.
OTOH, managers generally (and not just in the public sector) like to have big budget and headcount numbers on their résumés as proof of scope of responsibility.
Thanks for sharing this story. This is something I suspected and have actually complained to customer support about repeatedly (things are buried within menus of menus, strange link redirects that don't make sense, functionality that is not available to business owner accounts but is available to the supporting accountant-logins!!). These terrible patterns that keep users from more easily managing their books and the awful lobbying of congress to keep taxes complex are why I think people should actively boycott Intuit software.
Just a note, not to argue any of your substantial points, but Intuit announced about a year ago that they will no longer develop a desktop version of Quickbooks for Mac (leaving v. 2016 as the last version, officially supported through May 2019). They continue to make a version for Windows.
> If software can simplify bookkeeping and make the profession obsolete
The GP's point isn't that software can simplify bookkeeping but that bookkeeping itself is not simple.
Any company (especially startups) that gets to scale eventually outgrows Quickbooks. You don't see any F500 or any large scale startup ($100M+ in revenue) using QB because it simply isn't built for those type of needs. But there are swaths of bookkeepers who understand how it works and how to migrate their profession to NetSuite/SAP/Intacct/etc.
QB is the bookkeeping equivalent of Excel. It does it's job well and power users benefit massively from it. Pitch and Bench are competitive, but the aren't great fits for someone who will eventually need more professional finance or uses a tax accountant that is more efficient with their tool of choice.
In isolation that sounds fantastic. When looking at the greater market dynamics, it's not at roses. Professionals tend to form opinions in the interest of their self preservation, whether consciously or otherwise.
By shaving off the time it takes to keep the books, a percentage of clients will decide that the time it takes to keep the books isn't worth outsourcing. The shorter you make the time commitment, the more the cost/benefit analysis leans that way.
You've also made it easier for other bookkeepers. Now they have more room in their day for more clients, plus the barrier of entry for new bookkeepers is powered by the easier software. All of a sudden you have negative pricing pressure driving your rates down and next thing you know your client base has gone up but your rates have gone down and you're making the same amount of money but with more client management overhead due to additional clients being serviced.
Then at some point, the ease of use shrinks to the point where a critical mass of the client base have decided to do it themselves, and you start finding it hard to source enough clients to fill all 8 hours a day, and have yet more negative pricing pressure to make up for it. What started as making your job more efficient evolved into making your job so efficient you weren't needed.
Quickbooks isn't slow to use, it's unintuitive. That's a crucial difference to your calculation. An experienced Quickbooks user can still work very quickly by internalizing the wonkiness. The inefficiency is suffered by novice users.
In the UK the SMB accounting market is owned by Freeagent and Xero, which are both really easy to use. We used QB for a short period of time. It was a terrible piece of software and we couldn't dump it fast enough. They are still entrenched in the US but I wouldn't expect their so-called competitive advantage of "hard to use" to last.
I agree with this. Good software updates that I've resisted in the past have often surprised me at how much I prefer them once I acclimate to them.
The alternate line of thinking, that nothing big about the UI or system can ever change unless a customer specifically asks for it, seems to conveniently pop up in teams with enormous technical debt that make big changes unthinkable for managers. I'm guessing this is the case for QuickBooks - given the years they've spent supporting an inconsistent system, apparently with a goal of preventing it from becoming consistent, while also inserting customer-requested features.
I have a hunch that if you're afraid of inconveniencing customers by making the software better, then the real problem is that you're afraid users won't stick around, and it's because you think that you haven't taken good enough care of them to weather the bump of re-acclimation. Compare the unchanging-system strategy to Snapchat's. Snapchat regularly improves their software (and users complain about it until they re-acclimate), because they are confident that users will stick around through updates; this confidence comes from the fact that they know they do a good job serving their users. So, my hunch is that when this unchanging-system strategy emerges, it's likely because you've already spent a long time disappointing users and eroding customer confidence.
I work in accounting and completely disagree with your statements.
Quickbooks is VERY easy to learn and use. It is almost like word where you can kind of just jump into it and learn as you go. That's how easy it is to use. Compared to other "higher end" accounting software packages, Quickbooks is a dream come true. That's why people prefer to use it. It is easy and straight forward. Same story for turbo tax. Another big reason so many companies use it is because the available labor pool of people who know how to use Quickbooks is huge which helps to keep labor costs low. If you have some obscure accounting software then you will struggle to find a qualified candidate for a fair wage. Then it eventually becomes a moat for Intuit because everyone is using it and people are hesitant to move away from it - similar to Windows.
Most CPAs aren't using Turbotax, they are using the higher-end professional tax prep software programs. Turbotax is mainly focused at people who want to do their own taxes quickly without having to pay a professional.
Quickbooks isn't that hard, but it's got a lot of inconsistencies. For instance, when I'm viewing a list of customers, I have to drill way down to the individual customer edit screen to make the customer inactive, but when I'm viewing a list of transactions, I can delete one simply from the right-hand menu on the list item. Both are similar list widgets, but the actions you take to interact with the widgets are completely different. It's not hard once you learn it, but you have to learn how to use each screen individually instead of learning patterns that can be applied across different screens.
Intuit's pro tax offering is called Lacerte and it has many points of integration between TurboTax and Quickbooks. To Intuit, the relationships they have with CPAs and bookkeepers don't apply to a single product. Not having worked in the tax group, I tend to be careless about saying TurboTax when I'm referring to the larger tax group, but you're right that I probably should have been clearer that most of the CPAs they deal with are not connected with TurboTax.
I am a small business owner that does my own bookkeeping. After 9 years on Quickbooks - gritting my teeth the whole time - I switched my 4 entities to Xero and couldn't be happier. I am having a hard time understanding your justification of a poor UX and a closed platform. That's not what I'm seeing as a customer.
I use QuickBooks so someday other small businesses / investors / industries could easily review my books. Some areas ripe for disruption: better serialized inventory and warranty tracking, barcode scanner support, QBAR reporting documentation, adding custom columns to printed item receipts, integrating with HR providers (Gusto), importing bank statements for reconciliation in PDF, any marketing or CRM integration, running performance comps, mileage and GPS tracking (Corrigo is step in right direction), verifying customer addresses in invoices.
Some things that strike me as odd: a feature to repair the data file (should I run daily? Annually?). Broken filters that still give reports without warnings they are broken (wrong data < no data). Multi-users in invoices, one saves and the entire system crashes. QBAR takes up to an hour to refresh data and says its on step 141 of 132. OS/2 Warp floppies had more accurate progress meters in the 1990s. If you had a button for “fax this PO to my vendor” it might be revolutionary.
> Second, the fact that Quickbooks is so awkward and inconsistent to use isn't a UI problem, it's a feature. This is an important lesson in designing software that people use for their jobs.
This is an interesting point but isn't there a risk that this will backfire long term? Existing bookkeepers may stick to Intuit, but if a new bookkeeper can learn Pilot.com in half the time, and without a class, won't they be able to get customers at a lower price, and eventually cut into Intuit's business that way?
Edit: And also this doesn't account for DIY customers, for whom any time above 0 is too much spent on bookkeeping, and would definitely value an easier product.
In the world of bookkeeping only accountants apply. Because of the complexity of tax laws you need to be an accountant to figure them out - it isn't worth your time unless you will use it constantly. It is a boring an tedious subject with legal implications if you get it wrong: you are better off focusing on your own business and letting an accountant take care of these details.
Thus if your accountant asks you to enter your spending into some program you buy that program and enter the details. Every few months your accountant files some forms, and once in a while gives you some spending advice.
The last thing accountants want is for business owners to decide that their accountant isn't cost effective vs. do it themselves. Most of the forms an accountant fills out are automated. The only thing left is audit (the numbers add up, but do they make sense?), and advice.
Sounds like a space ripe for innovation then. Even my accountant struggles with the more esoteric parts of the user interface. If I could find a better payroll solution, I would have already moved on by now.
The point about Quickbook being hard to use as a barrier of entry is correct. It is indeed a feature once Quickbook is already widely used.
On the other hand, should we intentionally make a software product that's hard to use? How does it get off the ground to the point of being widely used in the first place?
I completely agree. The observation is less useful when looking at how Quickbooks is/was built and more useful from the viewpoint of building a Quickbooks competitor. Just fixing broken UI interaction patterns isn't going to be successful. If you want to beat Quickbooks, you need to either replace the accountants that small businesses use entirely or offer those accountants a significantly better value proposition than Intuit does. Because what they have now is working and their livelihoods depend on it. They have processes in place that are built around Quickbooks. The status quo works, so you almost need to be revolutionarily better to overcome that level of friction.
Quickbooks is marketed as being easy to use! And it is, have you ever used some old crappy accounting software?
When software like Quickbooks first came out, your other options for a small business were complicated programs like ACCPAC or stuff that only ran on larger systems like IBM’s.
A nice GUI lets you use the mouse and the other parts of Windows/PC that you already know instead of a cryptic keyboard driven character-based interface.
Interesting insight here. It reminds me of a similar case in video games, namely traditional real-time strategy games like Starcraft. The UX design in these games is pronounced and inelegant, in part because it raises the skillcap of high level play. For professional RTS players, not only is your tactical decision making a differentiatior, but also your ability to manipulate the various UI menus as fast as possible.
> For professional RTS players, not only is your tactical decision making a differentiatior, but also your ability to manipulate the various UI menus as fast as possible.
Is it, though? What original StarCraft did right, and what was likely a big part of what made it popular as a pro game, was that you could do almost everything with the keyboard. Storing and recalling groups of units, selecting commands, abilities, moving the screen around, etc. - all of that was just one keypress away, and easily-discoverable one at that. About the only thing you need the mouse for in pro SC play is pointing and clicking to select units or target commands you've activated by keyboard. In particular, you don't navigate any "UI menu" ever.
First, Quickbooks is frequently not chosen directly. Many, many small businesses choose their bookkeeper first and use whatever they use. One trick Intuit uses both in Quickbooks (bookkeepers) and TurboTax (CPAs) is to put a lot of effort/money into focusing on those relationships knowing that they have a huge indirect impact on acquiring and keeping customers.
Second, the fact that Quickbooks is so awkward and inconsistent to use isn't a UI problem, it's a feature. This is an important lesson in designing software that people use for their jobs. When you make elegant, intuitive software that almost anyone can use in short order, it stops being an impressive item to put on a resume. And it stops being a barrier to entry for competing professionals. Software like Quickbooks that's hard to use correctly becomes a selling point for bookkeepers and almost accomplishes the same purpose (though to a lesser degree) than professional licensing organizations...it limits the competition and keeps the rates they can charge high.
So many Quickbooks competitors have failed to knock them off their perch by not realizing that their customers aren't really their target audience and what should be their target audience doesn't want easy.