Case Study: Intuit QuickBooks gives voice to small business workers with Dscout

Intuit QuickBooks deepens small business research with dscout’s 90-day diary study

Intuit QuickBooks, a financial software company, sought to deeply understand the employees of small businesses, a group whose experiences were often overlooked. The challenge was to gain rich, longitudinal insights into these workers' lives, including their financial struggles and motivations, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when traditional field research was difficult. They partnered with the vendor dscout to conduct this research using its Diary study product.

dscout's solution involved an unmoderated longitudinal diary study that captured the daily highs and lows of small business employees over time, building rapport to gather candid financial details. The results provided Intuit QuickBooks with profound insights that directly influenced product development for tools like QuickBooks Payroll. The research had a significant impact, sparking a chain of adjacent research projects and product explorations, and leading to an unplanned follow-up session and a subsequent quantitative study to scale the findings.

Intuit QuickBooks