Intuit Content Design Systems

How did our content design system end up in NN/g?

For
Intuit
Role
Senior Visual Designer
Team
Content Architect
Developer

Overview

The Intuit Content Design community page, headlined “Content design makes connections” on a magenta gradient.

Problem

Content designers had 16 scattered files instead of one set of guidelines. Each was incomplete and followed its own rules.

Why it mattered

Without one reliable place to look, content designers spent more time finding answers than writing for customers.

Goal

One site where anyone writing at Intuit could find answers fast and get them right.

Outcome

Three of us replaced the 16 files with one site. After the 2020 redesign, traffic grew 140% year over year. NN/g said our standards were so comprehensive they needed their own site.

The problem

Content guidelines were split across 16 separate files. An earlier attempt to combine them produced a janky website, not much better than a Word doc.

The 2018 homepage: a plain white page of small, dense text under a dark top bar.
The site in 2018, before I worked on it.

The obvious home was Intuit's main design system site, but that team wasn't ready: their site couldn't support our guidance yet. Our content design leaders pushed for over a year, then made the case for a separate site in the meantime.

What we found

Every content designer at Intuit relied on those 16 files. An audit of each one, plus interviews with content designers, turned up three problems. I designed the site around what they found.

The files contradicted each other. The same question got different answers depending on the file. Nobody owned them, so nobody kept them current.

Guidance was hard to read and harder to find. Walls of text, no examples, and no way to search.

Content designers couldn't contribute. Every file used its own format, so there was no clear way to add to them. Content designers also had little say in shaping the guidance, so they didn't fully trust it.

What we did

A design system for the system

Intuit's design system was built for function, not craft, and content design leadership wanted something better. So I used it as a starting point and built a complete design system, with its own type, color, and components, all documented and tested in code with our developer.

A table of contents with “AI principles” selected, beside a form for suggesting a word list addition.
Search results for “sorry,” grouped into word list entries and help articles.
A chatbot answer about quarterly material costs, with its source and Yes and No buttons.
A do and don’t example about urgency, beside a 404 page with a hand-drawn tree.

The redesign

How do you get people to read a wall of text? I redesigned the site twice, in 2020 and 2021, to make the guidance easier to read, scan, and find, and worth looking at.

A table of contents and search made answers easy to find. Do and don't examples showed the rules in action instead of just describing them.

The homepage with an illustration of the content design team dressed in pink, above an introduction to the guidelines.
The 2020 redesign.
The homepage with a “Content at Intuit” banner and a What’s new list of guideline updates.
The 2021 redesign.

Anti-racist language guidance

In 2021, our content design leaders took a hard look at harmful words in our language and added anti-racist language guidance. Instead of another wall of text, I told it as a story, one principle at a time, with my own illustrations and an animation. A motion designer and a developer helped me bring it to life.

Illustration of a head in profile, filled with muted, leaf-like shapes.
People come first.
Illustration of a ring of muted fragments breaking apart.
If it’s harmful to one group, it’s harmful to all groups.
Illustration of a muted flower ringed by leaves.
We’re inclusive of other cultures, but we don’t appropriate them.
Illustration of a flower in full bloom, in vivid purple and green.
There are no shortcuts to building an antiracist culture.

See all nine principles

Results

140% growth

in site traffic year over year after the 2020 redesign

31%

of visitors came from outside the US

10,000

views of the anti-racist language guidance in 2024

Thousands of Intuit employees used the site, across design, marketing, communications, learning and development, and customer success.

We made it public to save time, so anyone could use it, not just Intuit. And because content designers could easily contribute, the site was updated often.

Adobe, 18F, Nike, Northwestern Mutual, Zendesk, and Confab have cited the anti-racist language guidance as a resource.

What others said

NN/g: "Intuit's content standards were so comprehensive that they lived on a separate site."

Andy Welfle, co-author of Writing is Designing: "The Intuit content design system website is one of the best resources for content standards out there on the internet."

The work was also mentioned in Fast Company, Forbes, Writer, Design System Central, HubSpot, and on KGO-TV.

Reflections

If I did it again, I'd move the site to design tokens in the 2021 redesign, not after. It's the one piece of the system I'd build sooner.

Three of us built contentdesign.intuit.com: our content architect Sarah, our developer Kiran, and me. We moved fast thanks to Tina O'Shea, Jennifer Schmich, and the whole content design community.