Onboarding for Taxes
Guiding Users to the Right Area
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  • Team Involved
  • Product Designer
  • 2 Product Managers
  • Software Developer
  • Tools
  • Figma
  • Mobbin
  • Miro
  • Teams / Jira
  • UserTesting
  • ChatGPT
  • Duration
  • 2 Sprints

The Problem

There was a ~41% of drop off rate after creating an account and before starting taxes.

My Contributions

With limited data and resources, we couldn't find the exact root cause.

Assumed some reasons might be:

  • Lack of onboarding so users might not be confident where to start
  • Users were just exploring the site because the CTA's say 'Start For Free'
  • The primary CTA to move forward is unclickable ( we saw this first-hand with a user in a Qualitative test and engineers said it was a 'known bug')
  • Incompatible browsers and or browser versions (experiences can be broken at times with certain browsers)

Hypothesis

While the exact reason is unclear, to help reduce drop-off, the team focused on improving onboarding by asking a few key questions to understand each user’s situation and recommend the right tax form. A problem found is that many times users think they need to file for business taxes but actually should be filing for personal taxes under Schedule C (sole proprietorship).
So we agreed that an onboarding flow would help capture their situation and guide them to the correct form.

Success Results:

This design is now live, and all new TaxAct users experience it during account creation, helping guide them to the correct form.

1. Empathize: Discovery & Research

Objectives

  • Understand who the users are and what their experience is
  • Look at competitors and how TaxAct compares
  • Identify user pain points, behaviors, and motivations
  • Understand the business need
  • Gain insights from analytics and customer service representatives

Current Experience

  • User are coming from 'Start for Free' or 'Create Account'
  • If users come from 'Start for Free' they might just be browsing

Based on analytics, there is high drop-off before a user gets to the screen after the welcome page.

How competitors compare

  • Majority of competitors are using onboarding questions to understand the user's specific situation. TaxAct was 1 of the only companies not using onboarding questions in the beginning of the tax experience.
  • TurboTax was already doing what we were thinking of
  • Overwhelming amount of information on each screen
  • Painpoint found: For Schedule B TaxAct had ~30+ continuous screens of questions while TurboTax and the original IRS had the same information on as a list

TurboTax and the IRS Schedule B questions. ‍

Looking at TurboTax experience for inspiration.

2. Ideate and Prototype

Design Objectives

  • Minimum number of questions to ask to understand the user's situation and recommend if they need to be in a personal or business tax form.
  • Create interactive prototypes to test key workflows and identify usability challenges
  • Iterate based on user feedback to refine functionality, navigation, and user experience
View Prototype

Design Mocks

During this phase, we focused on creating the least amount of questions needed to understand the user's situation and recommend business or personal taxes.

Flowchart of how we were thinking onboarding would work for this project.

Leveraged AI to figure out how to phrase the categories

Reviewed this video to understand personal vs business taxes

Initial ideation

3. Test

Guerilla Testing with Coworker

Had my coworker test the design because we were limited with time. My coworker was a perfect candidate because they have an LLC and unsure how they would file because they typically pay someone to do their taxes.

Research Goals

  • Can users get through the prototype without any issues?
  • Noting any painpoints and revising if necessary.
  • Anything else stand out?

Research Findings

  • Coworker would select the boxes but said afterwards that they never saw the links underneath the boxes on either of these designs. This alone made me think of other alternatives to make sure the user would make a selection but also be able to click on the more information link, if needed.
4. Launch

Final Designs

This has been implemented and is the very first experience all new users see after creating an account and starting their taxes.

First screen to understand if the user has something that might qualify as a business.

Second screen that tries to understand how the user's business is setup.

Third screen that recommends what type of tax form the user would want to fill out (personal or business).

The final designs for the onboarding experience.

Summary

This project took a bit of time to understand the different tax forms and when users would most likely fill them out. We used ChatGPT to get ideas for the categories and for content throughout. We also looked at TurboTax for inspiration. After talking with users, we felt this is almost like a catch net to let users know that even though they have a business it might not need to be filed as business taxes for IRS purposes.

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