Design for delight by Intuit: customer-centric design templates

Intuit’s mission is to power prosperity around the world. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to prosper, and we never stop working to find new, innovative ways to make that possible. One of the secrets of our success is our unique culture of innovation that brings together customer obsession with design thinking.

Falling in love with the problem, not the solution

From the beginning, we’ve always put customers at the center of everything we do. We fall in love with their problems and never our solutions. At Intuit, we have developed innovation capabilities that have been at the core of our ability to grow and thrive for over 38 years.

Design for Delight is a method that starts with deep customer empathy on the pain customers are experiencing, then goes broad in seeking possible solutions, and then uses rapid experimentation and data to ultimately land on a solution.

The key in this approach is making sure we obsess about falling in love with the customer problems and not our solutions. By keeping this focus, we can continue to act like a 38 year old start up, remaining nimble and flexible in seeking new, innovative solutions to evolving customer problems. From entrepreneurs to students, from teachers to non-profits, Design for Delight can be used by anyone with a problem that they want to solve.

How to use the Design for Delight templates

The templates that make up Design for Delight by Intuit can be used independently or in combination to help when you need to:

Gain deep empathy for those you are solving for
Generate ideas
Narrow your focus
Test your ideas
Run end-to-end design sprints

The four templates are outlined below with ways to leverage. As you get more practice with these methods, make them your own. Implement different methods and components as different plays in your playbook.

Deep Customer Empathy

Deep Customer Empathy creates shared understanding, insights, and motivation to improve the lives of our customers. Gain empathy by observing people where and when they are experiencing pains or problems using the follow me home section. And then begin to fall in love with the problem by declaring a Customer Problem Statement.

Go Broad to Go Narrow

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Go Broad to Go Narrow focuses on what is most important. Use your creativity to explore a variety of potential solutions. To best maximize your creativity use the 7 to get 1 method to kick off your brainstorming. Then go narrow by focusing on bold solutions most likely to delight your customers. Get uncomfortably narrow through techniques like the 2x2 or 10 Vote exercises.

Rapid Experiments with Customers

Rapid Experiments with Customers tests solutions quickly. When running experiments with real customers, quickly learn what works and what does not. This will save valuable time and resources when making your next decision. To kick off experimentation, identify the unknown pieces of your idea that must be true for your idea to be successful. This is where the Leap of Faith Assumptions method comes into play. Once you identify what is important to test, put your science lab coat on and create a hypothesis statement and experiment plan to help you know what you'll run and how you will measure success. Lastly, it's time to get building. Create your prototype and go share your ideas!‍

Design for Delight Method

Design for Delight is an innovation method. Successful teams apply Design for Delight skills to their work, continuously delighting customers. Sometimes you are ready to run your end-to-end sprint all in one place, which is where the Design for Delight Method template will help. Go from observations to insights to ideation to experimentation in this template to kickstart your next innovation.