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Earned Wage Access (EWA) project
I built an AI-powered skill, trained on my content guidelines, that allowed my team to independently evaluate any content asset.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Create a trusted EWA program, providing employees a portion of their pay before payday. This highly-regulated business area has consequential legal stakes. Although legal approval was required to ship, before I created the EWA Content Guidelines, there was no single record of what Intuit's legal team and our third-party provider had actually approved.
Knowledge was trapped in the heads of individuals—PMs, product designers, developers, lawyers, third-party partners—none of whom had the same information.
Cross-functional teammates had no reliable way to know whether the content they were creating was compliant. Reviews were slow, inconsistent, and dependent on whoever happened to hold the institutional knowledge. Non-compliant content could create serious legal exposure. We needed to move quickly and confidently.
MY ROLE & APPROACH
I made the implicit explicit, capturing everything that existed only in people's heads and turning it into a living, authoritative reference any teammate could use, regardless of how long they'd been on the team.
I created an authoritative reference document, providing reasoned guidance any team member could use.
The EWA Content Guidelines covered everything cross-functional teams needed: core content principles, rules around clear customer authorization, compliance checklist, legally approved benefits language, approved calls to action and value propositions, partnership language governing how to reference Intuit and our third-party partner, legal disclosures, and—perhaps most importantly—a clear list of language we could not use. Each section explained not just the rule, but the reason behind it. These clear, well-crafted content guidelines were essential for using AI to increase velocity.
INCREASING VELOCITY AND CONFIDENCE WITH AI
The guidelines solved the documentation problem. However, a resource document still requires people to read it, internalize it, and correctly apply specialized compliance language. That's a high bar for non-content specialists.
I built an AI-powered compliance skill that enabled cross-functional teammates to review what they wrote against content and legal standards—eliminating bottlenecks and scaling content and legal expertise across the team.
Using Claude, I built a skill that identified every violation, explained why in plain language, and suggested compliant replacement content. Teammates could copy and paste into Claude or have Claude access documents directly. This was especially useful during the design process when most of the content was in Figma files.
REFLECTION
The most impactful thing a content designer can do is build an infrastructure that makes good writing possible for everyone.
This project reinforced something I believe deeply about content design at scale. The most impactful thing a content designer can do is build an infrastructure that makes good writing possible for everyone, and then make that infrastructure invisible enough that people don't even realize they're using it. The content guidelines and AI skill together represent that idea: specialized knowledge, easily accessible, applied automatically, at the moment it's needed.
SPEED
Content evaluated for compliance in seconds rather than days.
ACCESSIBILITY
Any team member can self-check work against legal and content standards.
PEACE OF MIND
Teams ship with confidence, knowing the content meets the same standards and legal uses.
INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY
Critical compliance knowledge lives in the AI-powered skill, not individuals.
ACCESS POINTS
These in-product discovery (IPD) cards are doing a lot of careful work to make the EWA product feel safe and frictionless.
Headline
The headline reframes the advance as a benefit you already own rather than debt. "Your earnings" is the key phrase, signaling this is money you've already earned which increases adoption.
Body
This content does three jobs. It names the partner for trust and transparency, states the value prop plainly, and removes friction by noting it goes into an account they already have, no account setup required.
Primary CTA
The primary CTA is specific rather than vague ("Get started"). It quantifies the benefit immediately, uses "unlock" to suggest something that already belongs to them, and "first" implies repeatability, hinting this is an ongoing relationship, not a one-time offer.
Secondary CTA
The secondary CTA is a low-commitment action that’s intentionally understated, giving cautious users an option without competing visually with the primary CTA.
The fine print
The legally required content at the bottom is doing its necessary compliance work, but its placement and small size keep it from undercutting the optimistic tone above.
This placement of the IPD is the most contextually aligned of the screens so far. It sits under a "For you" header, which is a softer, more editorial framing than a hard ad placement. It implies personalization and relevance rather than interruption, and it's positioned after the primary content (the chart) rather than above it, so the user's first task, seeing their pay, isn't blocked.
Header
The header is precise. It speaks directly to the exact moment and mental state of someone looking at a pay chart and mentally calculating how much runway they have until the next deposit. This is strong contextual content. The message isn't generic, it's anchored to the specific anxieties or questions this screen may surface.
Body
The body content removes friction by emphasizing no new account setup, consistent with the other placements, reinforcing a single coherent value proposition across touchpoints rather than re-explaining the product differently each time.
Location
The Time Clock screen is the core utility, where users check their hours and clock in and out, so every word here is competing with a task-focused mindset.
Placement and timing
The IPD sits directly above the timesheet, in the highest-attention zone right below the tab navigation, before the user even sees their actual hours. That's a deliberate choice to interrupt the task with the EWA offering at a moment when the person is thinking about work and pay, arguably the most receptive moment for an earned-wage message. The interruption stays clear of the primary CTA (“Clock in”), not getting in the way of what the person came to do, clock in.
The “Clock in” button is locked at the bottom of the screen, so it doesn’t get pushed further down the screen by the IPD.
Header
The "NEW" tag plus "CLAIR ON-DEMAND PAY" label function as small wayfinding devices, telling users this is a feature, not an ad.
Body
The body ties the offer explicitly to the action happening on this screen, shift work and timesheets, rather than using generic "early access" language. That's an intentional content choice, meeting users where they are instead of feeling like an unrelated ad.
CTA
The primary CTA repeats the same specific, ownership-framed pattern from the previous card, providing a consistent voice across touch points, which is good for trust and recognition.
IPD footer
Pairing the recognizable QuickBooks logo with the Clair logo at the bottom of the card also does trust-transfer work, using QuickBooks' credibility to vouch for a third-party financial product.
Location
The Time Clock screen is the core utility, where users check their hours and clock in and out, so every word here is competing with a task-focused mindset.
Placement and timing
The IPD sits directly above the timesheet, in the highest-attention zone right below the tab navigation, before the user even sees their actual hours. That's a deliberate choice to interrupt the task with the EWA offering at a moment when the person is thinking about work and pay, arguably the most receptive moment for an earned-wage message. The interruption stays clear of the primary CTA (“Clock in”), not getting in the way of what the person came to do, clock in.
The “Clock in” button is locked at the bottom of the screen, so it doesn’t get pushed further down the screen by the IPD.
Header
The "NEW" tag plus "CLAIR ON-DEMAND PAY" label function as small wayfinding devices, telling users this is a feature, not an ad.
Body
The body ties the offer explicitly to the action happening on this screen, shift work and timesheets, rather than using generic "early access" language. That's an intentional content choice, meeting users where they are instead of feeling like an unrelated ad.
CTA
The primary CTA repeats the same specific, ownership-framed pattern from the previous card, providing a consistent voice across touch points, which is good for trust and recognition.
IPD footer
Pairing the recognizable QuickBooks logo with the Clair logo at the bottom of the card also does trust-transfer work, using QuickBooks' credibility to vouch for a third-party financial product.
This is an "ambient" placement of the IPD, placed on the Overview screen rather than a task-specific one, and the content and positioning reflect that.
The IPD sits between the "Day total" card and the "Schedule" card, after the employee has just seen they’ve clocked out and worked 7:56 of 8 hours. That's a meaningful moment, the workday just ended, which is arguably the most natural transition point to introduce getting money before payday, since the user has tangible proof of hours just worked. Unlike the Money screen, where the user is actively reviewing pay history, here the user is glancing at a daily summary, so the IPD is more of a passive aside than an answer to a question they're actively asking.
Headline
The header is notably more literal and a bit more financially precise than the other screens ("get paid after your shift," "no need to wait for payday"). Using "advance" explicitly, rather than softer framings like "early access" or "unlock," is a more transparent word choice here. "Unlock your first $50" is a conversional CTA with a concrete incentive.