Role: Senior Product Designer
Team: Intuit Platform / Identity
Date: 2024

QuickBooks: Automating Identity Verification for ProAdvisor Network Onboarding

I partnered with two product teams to lead the redesign of the ProAdvisor onboarding experience. I created a new, automated identity-verification flow that replaced a slow manual process, making it faster and easier for experts to get verified and publish their profiles. This was a zero-to-one effort shaped heavily by design.

The Problem Space

The QuickBooks ProAdvisor Directory™

The program offers a platform for success and enables experts to market their business through a “Find-A-Pro” search directory to over 2.6 million small and medium-sized businesses, expanding their reach and potential client base.

Customer Problem

It takes too long for financial pros and experts to get verified and published.

Experts joining the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Network Directory faced a long, manual onboarding process that required phone calls with support and duplicate data entry across multiple systems—causing frustration, delays, and frequent verification errors.

Challenge

At scale, the process was not sustainable. Every delay in verifying experts slowed the growth of the ProAdvisor Network, while those ready to onboard experienced longer wait times before connecting with clients—creating unnecessary friction at a critical first moment.

Problem Discovery

Research

I reviewed support tickets and ProAdvisor program data. We discovered friction wasn’t just technical — it was operational. Experts were being verified manually by support agents across multiple disconnected tools, creating delays and opportunities for error. Navigating this was sensitive, so I focused on building allyship with the onboarding team—framing our findings as a shared opportunity to improve efficiency.

Key Insights

Duplication created fatigue: Experts had to re-submit the same information they’d already verified earlier in the onboarding process just to get their profiles published in the directory.

Low conversion rate: Only 5% of eligible ProAdvisors completed verification and appeared in the directory. While I can’t share exact revenue figures, the manual process had a clear financial impact on the ProAdvisor Program.

Leading With Empathy

Reviewing Customer Sessions

I reviewed archived user study sessions and watched customers try to onboard on the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program and publish their profile. It was painful to watch and the following insights emerged:

Experts have to make a huge investment in completing certifications, in order to be considered ready to be part of the ProAdvisor program.

The onboarding process contains too many friction points before an expert can publish their profile, and it lacks clear information early on to guide users through the process.

Long verification wait times caused many experts to disengage or abandon the onboarding process entirely.

🤦🏾

More Profile Publishing Friction

I uncovered that even after completing all required trainings, experts hit a second barrier: a manual document-review and identity-verification process spread across multiple disconnected systems. This multi-tool workflow creating delays, drop-off, and unnecessary operational overhead.

Proposed Solution

How Might We Think About Doing Identity Verification In Seconds, Not Days

Learnings exposed customer frustration and validated the need to bring some sort of automation in the process to prevent having to re-submit information and wait days for approval. The Intuit Platform / Identity team partnered with QuickBooks to explore integrating identity verification directly into the onboarding flow and offer a behind-the-scenes data-transfer flow that removes the need for experts to re-enter information.

Automated & instantaneous identity verification

The updated process simplifies expert onboarding by directly transferring verified data into QuickBooks Online Accountant via a third-party verification vendor. Experts' profiles are automatically filled with pre-verified information, saving time and effort.

Role & Contributions

Took ownership from design concept to code

Own and drive the following tasks:

  • Platform/Identity SME for the QuickBooks ProAdvisor team.

  • Collaborated with the QuickBooks product team to design an E2E identity verification capability to expedite ProAdvisor Network onboarding.

  • Built a reusable component library for future capability adoption.

  • Designed happy/unhappy paths for verification triggers post-product and in-product profile re-verification events.

  • Participated in post-launch E2E development tests.

Plan for the unhappy paths

It was crucial to anticipate potential hiccups in the experience, including verification failures and customers who may not be eligible to sign up for the ProAdvisor program.

Results.

Learnings. 🧐

Due to confidentiality, I can only share high-level insights:

  • There were more successful verifications than failures. The highest success rates originated from those who signed up as sole proprietors, in which those entity types have a business owner’s personal identity associated with the business entity.

  • We found a correlation between verification failures and bad actors trying to get through the flow. It would be interesting to learn about their intentions.

  • Some users converted to QBO customers after being directed to the product recommendation screen because they were ineligible to join the ProAdvisor Network.

Credits.

  • Matthew Lett - Sr. Product Designer

  • Carrie Deakin (Sr. Content Designer)

  • Hami Nejadriahi
    Rudy Serna
    Michael Offenbecher
    Ranjith Kumar Narayanaswamy

  • Jason Gu

  • Keya Tollossa

Next

Intuit: AI/ML Account Recommendation Redesign