Expert scheduling

People like Claud, pictured here, use the expert scheduling tool to set their own schedules.

Every year, Intuit onboards thousands of TurboTax Live experts as seasonal employees. Before these professionals can start helping customers, they need to set up their base schedule—something both the experts and Intuit's staffing team depend on.

A previous team had built a self-service tool for this, but it was overwhelming. Too much information, confusing instructions, and experts were getting stuck on what should have been a straightforward step in their onboarding.

With a new tax season approaching, I led a content redesign of the scheduling tool. My goal was simple: turn a frustrating hurdle into something that actually helped experts feel ready and confident about their new role.

Role
Content Designer

Team
Intuit, Virtual Expert Platform

Timeline
May 2020 to June 2021

Our content design principles

As we redesigned the scheduling experience, three ideas kept coming up in our conversations and became our north star:

‍Guide with intent
Give people information exactly when they need it, so they always know where they are and what's next.

‍Celebrate progress
Use a warm, encouraging tone that acknowledges when someone completes a step—because this stuff can feel overwhelming.

‍Keep it simple
Break big, complicated tasks into smaller pieces that don't feel intimidating.

Future state concept for the scheduling tool.

The expert journey

Experts use the scheduling tool to set their weekly availability for a 12-week period leading up to tax season's end. This base schedule helps us make sure we have enough coverage for customers while working around when experts are actually available.

Part 1: Getting oriented
Experts get a walkthrough of how scheduling works and what to expect.

Part 2: Setting weekly hours
This is where experts pick their available hours for each of the 12 weeks. It gets tricky because:

You have to finish all 12 weeks before moving on
Each week has different hour requirements based on how busy we expect to be

Part 3: Final review
‍Experts can look over their entire 12-week schedule, make any tweaks, and submit it.

Laying the groundwork with a content audit

While my PM and interaction design partners were diving into specific problems and screens, I wanted to step back and look at the bigger picture—what story were we telling experts throughout this entire experience?

I put together an audit deck and asked my teammates to weigh in. Going through everything with fresh eyes revealed a lot of places where we could make the content work harder for experts.

Audit slides documenting the base schedule creation workflow, compiled from product screenshots, interface strings, design files, and data.

Updating the first-time use experience

Original instructions screen before redesign.

The audit showed that the onboarding screen had some real problems. Beyond just having too many scheduling rules, the whole thing was a mess—no headings, no visual hierarchy, just a wall of text. We were basically asking experts to read and remember everything at once, which was asking way too much.

Redesigned instructions screen (first iteration) featuring clear headings and logical information grouping.

My first try at redesigning it focused on clear headings and breaking up the information into logical chunks. But I still had too much content on there.

We put this version in front of experts, and they definitely found it easier to scan and understand than the original—but we knew we could do better.

Refined instructions screen with reduced content to minimize information overload.

After working with the visual design team, we got much more aggressive about cutting content to reduce the overwhelm.

Before launching, we made some calls about what really needed to be on this screen. Working with stakeholders, we kept only the essentials here and moved the rest to places where it would be more helpful—like right when experts actually need that information.

Future state concept for the scheduling tool.

Even after launch, my visual design partner and I kept refining the experience. This concept shows where we think it could go next—tighter headline, clearer hierarchy, and help that shows up exactly when experts need it.

Creating helpful error messages

Error message comparison showing original version (left) and first iteration (right).

The audit showed that our error messages didn’t help. They'd tell experts something was wrong but not how to fix it. Like "Your hours don't meet requirements"—okay, but what requirements? What should I change?

I pushed for a different approach: error messages should actually help people solve the problem, not just point it out.

Working spreadsheet documenting error message audit and revisions.

I worked with engineering to map out every possible error and talked with product managers about what was technically possible. Going through all of this, I realized something important—a lot of these errors could be avoided completely if we just gave people better guidance upfront.

First iteration of the redesigned error message with directive information.

For the errors we couldn't prevent, we wrote messages that told experts exactly what to do. Each one starts with the action they need to take. But even then, we wondered if that was enough.

Launched error message that accounts for unseen use cases while providing schedule approval guidance.

We know life happens—childcare falls through, someone gets sick, plans change. So we launched with messaging that acknowledged experts might need to skip a week and come back to it later. We wanted to be realistic about how people actually work while still meeting our business needs.

In-product guidance

Original weekly scheduling interface.

The original interface threw way too much information at experts all at once. A lot of it—especially the long introductory text at the top—would work better in an email or during training, not when someone's trying to actually schedule their hours.

First iteration with requirements content moved from instructions screen to scheduling interface.

We made some key changes to fix this:

Swapped out cold "minimum/maximum" language for friendlier ranges
Broke down complicated requirements into things people could actually scan and act on
Moved important information to places where it made more sense to experts

The final design focused on what experts really needed to see—their scheduled hours front and center—with help available when they needed it, but not getting in the way.

Learnings

It's hard to separate how much the content changes helped versus all the other design improvements we made, but the overall redesign definitely made things better for experts. Now they get:

Clear guidance that actually tells them what to do
Information that comes in manageable chunks instead of all at once
Error messages that help them fix problems instead of just pointing them out

This project reminded me of something important: good content design isn't about writing perfect copy. It's about understanding what people need well enough to know what to tell them, when to tell them, and—maybe most importantly—what to leave out.

The team that's working on this now has a solid foundation to build from. The approach we took—keeping things clear, contextual, and empowering—is still guiding how the tool evolves.

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