Experience Design: Intuit Tax Import
I was the sole lead Experience Designer on Tax Import since it's inception 3 tax seasons ago. When Tax Import started, it was based on a more limited program offered at that time. We also incorporated a second solution we offered into the product as well. It was a big challenge to make all the pieces work in a manner that would be easy for the customer, and I dug in for a long journey. During the 3 years I led the experience, interaction and visual design for the project, it has been completely redesigned, re-thought and radically improved in the end-to-end experience. So much so, it is now the highest rated solution in it's category by the industry's leading publication and has a net promoter increase of over 60 points between the prior tax season to the current one alone.
Published on: 
2012
Information Architecture, Product Design, User Interface Design
  • Intuit Tax Import
    Establishing the importance of the End-to-End Experience
    Heading into the previous tax season, the Tax Import team had an opportunity to radically change the experience of the product. Prior to this, the product experience was "inherited" from a previous solution and did not have an optimal experience. The team wanted to focus on the product improvements, but I took the opportunity to influence the team to think about the entire end-to-end experience. I didn't want to just improve the current functionality, but identify new features and improvements that will deliver delight at all points of our customer's workflow and points our customers engage us (marketing and support touch points included). Below is the end-to-end flow I presented to (and refined with) the team that served as our foundation of all the work and improvements we took on, tested with customers and iterated upon.
  • Dive into some UI Docs:

    And then compare these to the current year UI and experience I created...
  • Influencing the Team and Taking the Time to Articulate the Needs
    Here's an example when, from an experience perspective, the team zeroed into a certain solution, and as the experience expert I had to influence the team that we needed to do more than that to achieve the outcomes we were all seeking. The team felt the one "feature" was the best we could do with the time we had, and I challenged the team to think beyond identifying individual pieces of work to think about fixing a customer problem across the end-to-end experience.

    I put together this deck and walked our team and decision makers through to illustrate the importance of the changes needed. After taking this time to articulate the benefits of doing the additional changes I identified as critical (for both the customer and the business), and what we would lose if we didn't get it, the team was on board and committed the necessary resources to deliver all the changes I requested.

    My product team leaders thanked me for taking the time to influence the business to commit to this in order to deliver the best experience possible, and in service to the product's core success metrics.
  • Test Fast, Test Light
    One of many test documents shown to customers for feedback and product improvements: