Customer Driven Innovation: Quicken® Rental Property Manager

Abstract
In an effort to find and solve new unmet customer needs, the Quicken® Personal Finance Group (QPFG) embarked on a mission to create innovative new products that would truly make a difference in people’s lives. Quicken® Rental Property Manager is the first of these products and the first “version 1.0” outside of Quicken® Personal Finance Software to be released from the Quicken® group in a decade.

This paper will focus on how the team blazed a new trail within an organization that is facing the challenge of a maturing financial software market, and was entrenched in twenty-one years of legacy processes and mindsets. Specifically, how the team:
::used customers to identify and define the innovation;
::developed new processes for gathering user feedback throughout the project;
::successfully designed a simple, intuitive, easy- to-use customer experience;
::successfully delivered on the organization’s challenge

Keywords
Analysis, Business Case, Business Strategy, Concept Design, Design Planning, Experience Strategy, Interaction Design, Interdisciplinary Design, Marketing / Market Research, Office, Organizational Culture, Organizational Planning, Participatory Design, Performance Metrics, Process Improvement, Product Design, Product Management, Prototyping, Usability Research, User-Centered Design / Human-Centered Design, User Experience, User Interface Design, User Research, User Studies, Visual Design.

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First presented at the conference on Designing for User eXperience, November 3-5, 2005, San Francisco, CA