The challenge

In the world of corporate tax calculators, user experience is not a high priority. Instead, engineers try to pack as much information and functionality above the fold as possible, and divide the remaining parts among an endless series of tabs, icons, and overlays. When design is applied, it's often unbalanced or heavy-handed, which creates pockets of distraction, rather than implicit information.

This reality exists because the people who decide which tax software to buy for their organization are not the people who will end up using it for 8+ hours a day, so the decision often come down to price, not quality. Ultimately, the end users are forced to spend weeks training on these difficult tools in order to compensate for the lack of UX research involved in developing the product.

The opportunity

I've chosen to break from the antiquated design patterns of previous industry leaders, which are essentially different remixes of Microsoft Excel. I can instead build a product that takes advantage of advancements in modern work machines, and tailor it to the needs of the today's end user.

Research

Competitive analysis

It's easy for me to look at examples of corporate tax software and dismiss them as a collection of UX mistakes. However, after analyzing them closely and discovering patterns that exist in most examples, several facts become clear:

• Information proximity: Having data points close together is important, because users need to reference multiple segments of existing data as they're creating new data.
• Data tables: These are the most effective way to organize tax information, so this is the wheel that I should not reinvent.
• Data prioritization: Secondary information should be hidden in plain sight, in the form of collapsed rows or easily accessible panels.
• Wasted effort: Repetitive work is very common, so any way I can find to eliminate or minimize it would be a productivity boost.
• Minimalism: With a data-rich experience like this, aesthetic decisions need to be made in a very delicate manner, and in a way that scales to the entire experience. Having too many unique design elements can become tedious.

User interviews

My big advantage in designing and building this tool is that I share a building with many experienced accountants, ones who use similar tools every day. In researching this experience, I met with accountants who don't use the tools assigned to them, and instead are clever enough to develop their own macros to do their work faster. These macros served as a blueprint to help me understand how best to reorganize and optimize features and information on the screen.

As my continued to improve my prototype, I held dogfooding sessions with groups of volunteers. I gave them test assignments and asked them to use my tool to complete them. I encouraged them to work together and ask each other questions as they learned the tool on their own, to simulate a real-world environment, and to see which features worked well and which ones needed to be more intuitive.

I also met with partners within the firm who were responsible for managing the clients that would ultimately be the customers of this app. I wrote an analysis detailing the unique reporting requirements for each client, which led me to build a feature into the app that allowed for custom report templates based on a set of inputs provided via JSON file. This improved upon the old method, which was to have engineers build custom report screens for each client. This allowed users to create custom reports by simply generating a new template and adding the necessary inputs.

Empathy map

Powered with the knowledge I gained by interviewing and monitoring associates in the firm as they were dogfooding my prototype, I was able to group all associates into 4 personas:

• Karolina: Senior Associate
• Michelle: Director
• Amir: Subject Matter Specialist
• Javier: Client

I then took all of the notes for each persona, and separated them into categories to fit into an empathy map. This helped me not just to understand the needs of each stakeholder for my product, but to also empathize with their concerns. I used these empathy maps as guides whenever I was considering a new design pattern or feature, asking myself how this would affect each persona.