leadership & optimization

Preparing for Tax Season

Problem

My client was a leading provider of tax services, with a robust online platform and a complex, mature team.

They engaged me to:

• Rethink their main checkout flow for the following year’s tax season

• Provide leadership and guidance to their in-house team and stakeholders

Approach

I formulated an approach that focused on collaboration and co-creation. This allowed us to:

• Share knowledge openly and freely

• Make best use of the team’s expertise

• Create continuity for the design exercise after completion and hand-off.

The execution was organized into three acts.

• Act I: Discovery and Research

  • Product & Platform Discovery

  • Competitive UX Landscape

  • Web Analytics

  • Independent User Research

• Act 2: Ideation and Concept Creation

  • Co-creation of “Questions to Answer”

  • In-person workshop for “How Might We” and “Crazy 8s”.

  • Concept creation

• Act 3: Testing & Refinement

  • Design of artifacts

  • User testing

  • Selection and finalization

Solution

The solution we settled on solved for the difficulties that had sprung up in the course of the underlying product’s evolution. It provided a sound jumping-off point for the following tax season’s robust optimization workload.

The collaborative approach to the project allowed the client’s teams to own and engage with the solution.

This, in turn, lead to a happy project sponsor who was very thankful for the “people” component of the project.