Taxfix: Redesigning Complex Tax Processes While Working Remotely Across Cultures

When I joined Taxfix in 2020, I did so remotely from Australia until COVID would allow me to relocate to Berlin.

An important project I took over was prefilling tax returns. Prefill is data held by the tax office that is reported by third parties. In Germany, this information comes from employers, insurance providers, health funds, and various others. This information is incredibly valuable as it not only reduces the amount of time users spend preparing their return but also does it in an accurate way. It was a great tool for building good retention and conversion rates.

Accessing government services in Germany is often over-complicated for no reason. The challenge we had to deal with was the retrieval of the data which had to be done in 3 unique journey stages:

Opt-in – When the user opts in, we would send a request to the tax office. The tax office would send the user a unique code via post. Typically, this would take 7-10 business days, but when tax season is open, this can take up to 3 weeks.

Entering the code – When the user receives their code, they enter it into the app which is validated in almost real-time.

Preparing their return - After 48 hours, we typically receive the user's data after which they can start their return with prefill data.

We allowed users to opt into the prefill feature first to understand whether this was a viable product direction. Following user feedback closely and customer service conversations, we evolved the experience design.

After 3 weeks of iterating, testing, and reviewing, we finally arrived at a solution. While we could've taken additional time and resources to validate a more comprehensive list of hypotheses, we wanted to learn by getting something there as soon as possible and talking to users who were using the feature to iterate it best.

Before and After Before The original focus in the first iteration was communicating the key benefits of prefill and encouraging users to opt-in.

After After hearing from users who experienced the full journey of prefill, we discovered that users were more confused about what happens in each stage.

To overcome this, I chose to add a mini-onboarding style journey so users could better understand what the experience would entail.

What we delivered within a quarter were huge improvements to the user experience. Delivering most within 3 weeks:

Achieved an opt-in rate of 44% in first release 13 key product improvements 5 feature-ready concepts for next quarter Improved user experience across the entire flow Designing for English & German Designing for an English and a German version can be a challenge as German copy is always a lot longer than the English version. For example, in English what we described as "Prefill" was "Datenabruf." This had to be kept in mind when designing.

When I first started on the project, we had an enormous amount of user research and customer service data, but nothing offering a combined view of the journey. We had no joint understanding across our stakeholders of how users felt and where our pain points were. We were only guessing. So that's what I did - I combined all the research together to form a picture of our current experience and planned our future activities from there.

Ideating on Improvements to Pain Points As the team was situated across the globe, I held ideation sessions with a wide range of stakeholders (developers, content designers, and tax experts) to best explore how we could integrate pre-fill into our product whilst providing the best user experience.

Before I onboarded to the project, communication had been a key issue in preventing project success. To overcome the existing hurdles, I used the following techniques within these sessions:

Affinity clustering: clearly identified the core problems in the user's prefill journey Crazy 8s: exposed gaps in the group's perception of the journey Dot voting: created a consensus on our approach, and when paired with a why, ultimately created a common understanding of the end-solution All of these techniques (combined with some others) was a super effective method of getting everyone on the same page and pushing the project into a more mature state.

There were so many chefs in the kitchen. From C-level, heads of departments through to developers and other peer designers.

After some iterating on how concepts were presented, I delivered all concepts in a prototype and moved away from showcasing static designs. This really helped our stakeholders think about the user, to build on the empathy.

Presenting back user insights during the prototype helped our stakeholders give more quality feedback to real user problems.

Learning #1 Presenting in a prototype will not only help stakeholders think more about the journey the user will have to go through, but it also helps you gather more quality feedback as your stakeholders think more about the user journey.

From limited user research resources (I don't speak German and it had to be done in German) to unknown complexities with the German Tax Office, I approached each issue according to a risk score: Drop Everything, Prioritise for next Sprint, Next available.

This would help us make sure we dedicated resources to the areas that needed it.

Learning #2 When you're limited to doing research, reach out to customer service and gather conversation data. Put them on post-it notes and start clustering them together. You'll start seeing trends quickly and cheaply.