Role

UX Designer & Research collaborative in a team of 4 designers.

Tools

Figma, notion and google slides.

The brief

The IRS is open to ideas that improve their tax filing experience. Learn from research online and from those who are IRS users what works well and what could be improved about the current tax filing experience, and explore the replacement of services and features.

Discovery Research

Context

The current IRS mobile app is difficult to navigate for many. As UX Designers we need to understand the problems that users are facing, and come up with features that improves the user's tax filing experience.We decided to identify the user and understand the client.

  • What does the IRS ?

    The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) administers federal tax laws. The IRS performs three primary functions tax return processing, taxpayer service, and enforcement.

  • Who files taxes? US citizens - permanent residents who work in the United States need to file taxes.

  • Which is the most popular way to file taxes?

    92% of 2022 Returns were filed electronically. That means the process was submitted over the internet using tax preparation softwares.

Contextual Inquiry

Since every citizen who works in The United States needs to file taxes, I recruited five users to run a contextual inquiry to discover what type of devices they prefer and where they go when they enter the website for the first time. Just to start to have an idea what are users looking for.

  1. What services do you use to file your taxes? Why?

  2. Can you walk me step by step when you filed your taxes last time?

  3. When it comes to filing taxes, what is your most crucial factor and why?

  4. How has your experience contacted the IRS through phone or email? Can you explain the process?

  5. What is the most inconvenient factor when filing your taxes, and why?

We create an interview to extract our users' relationship with the tax filing process. We interviewed eight people with different backgrounds and experiences. I selected these five questions out of the fifteen to highlight what we discovered.

Key Interview Questions

We decided to make a competitive and comparative analysis of the public and private sector to identify opportunities for improving the customer experience across the IRS’s mobile app.

In the comparative analysis we were looking at government websites, agency websites, bank mobile app to figure out how we could include successful designs.

Competitive Analysis

Key Research Insights

After our research face we came out with some key insights.

  • Clear guidance

    Information has to be clear, and help resources (such as a help/ FAQ page) presented in an easy way for new taxpayers.

  • Reachable

    Digital services and in-person assistance should be conveniently reachable, show as a feature, and quickly found through navigation.

  • Risk of fees

    Minimized the risk of fees through features that would help the user to keep track.

Problem Statement

Our research narrowed to users need an efficient and easy way to navigate the IRS website and get support when they file taxes because currently for them is time consuming and there is not an easy way to access help immediately.

Solution Statement

We designed an application that allows the IRS to provide users with easy-to-follow direct instructions with information on tax preparation and a better way to communicate with the IRS.

Define

Personas

We want to understand the problem to solve it, design the scope, and address user needs appropriately.

The purpose of these personas is to create realistic representations of our key audience. After interviewing, we started to understand one significant difference in scenarios some were individuals employed on full-time basis jobs, and the other scenario was independent contractors or self-employed.

Primary

Secondary

Design

User flow

To meet the needs of both personas, we explored flows for two different functionalities.

We agreed that our design’s primary purpose would be to allow users to pay their taxes intuitively and to have an easy way of communicating with the team of experts.

Sketches

  • Behind an idea of the user path and how it would work the flow, we started to design and implement our solutions as a mobile app.

  • In initial sketches, we juggled ideas of making the app for easy reachability and intuitive payments and minimized the risk of fees.

Chat feature

Book appointment

Home page, payment and nav menu

Wireframes low - fidelity

We decided to create the low - fidelity wireframes and prototype the features and screens that we include so we could have feedback of the design before to create the high - fidelity.

  • Home page

  • Sign in page

  • Menu

  • Forms

  • Forms download

  • Profile

  • Payments

  • Contact us

  • Appointment dropdown menu

  • Interactive Calendar

  • Count down timer

Usability testing

Task

  • Find a way to access form w2 wage an income statement and download it on the mobile.

  • Find a way to make an appointment for December 18th at 10:00 AM PST.

    Methodology

  • Remote testing.

Key Finding

  • 3 out 5 users were confused between file my taxes and forms.

  • 4 out 5 users mentioned that appointment drop down menu was not functioning properly.

  • 1 user asked for a button to access more tax forms.

To get insights of user about the features that we add we tested five users.

Changes

This are some of the changes that we implemented after testing our low fidelity mockups.

  • Moved forms tab so it is more visible to users.

  • Changed Help tab into FAQ for less confusion.

  • Make a dropdown menu on book an appointment feature.

  • Add another tab to have access to additional tax forms.

The team decided to stay with the original colors because are recognizable to users and is important to stay with the brand identity and avoid any confusion, in terms to create something more fun the team decided to apply oranges to buttons and links highly contrasting.

The meaning of color

Blue

blue is not highly stimulating, which aid in feeling relaxed and clear minded, inviting introspection.

Orange

Radiating health and energy, orange demands to be looked at. Despite this extreme confidence, it is also a very approachable and human color. .

Appropriate Font

New features

  • We incorporated the search bar more visible to increase the discoverability of products and features.

  • Countdown till next tax date to avoid any fees.

  • Add appointments to calendar to reach out more efficient.

  • Fast payment options so users can access easy and fast.

Design system

Creating the design system in Figma, is not an easy task.

Instead of immediately starting the user interface for the product, first, we need to create a design system to make a structure. Designing the UI components is the most exciting part of user interface design. It is a good idea to make a list of components first.

  • Color palette

  • Options

  • List of options

  • Typography ‘

  • Dropdown menu

  • Calendar

  • Dates

Prototype Figma

This was the final prototype that implemented.

It was definitely a challenge to redesign IRS mobile app since it's such a large application. However, I learned a lot about how to stay within the app's current design system but make it less overwhelm and easy to digest . During our user testing, it was great to hear how if our designs were implemented, they would benefit both individual and self employed and how we gave a voice to the users through the app.

Also, the experience of working as a team was rewarding; I got to learn a lot from my peers as professionals and humans.

For our next steps, I would like to do the chat feature prototype and test it.

Takeaways