RSI is about to embark on a platform rebuild, NextGen, and wants to take advantage of the timing to improve the user experience. UEGroup’s mission is to reimagine the product experience to drastically improve the efficiency and intuitiveness while maintaining some familiarity for current pro users. The new design needs to create a strong UX foundation for their MVP NextGen product that can be built on by the internal team. Over 7 weeks, we conducted mixed methods research to define opportunities for improvement and created a conceptual design for a scalable framework for the RSI team to turn into reality.
Transforming Tax Management: A UX Framework for the Future
INDUSTRY
Consumer
B2B
B2B
PLATFORM
Mobile, Desktop
SERVICES
Design: Discovery Report, Initial Concepts, Final Design Document, Visual Design Assets
Research: User/Stakeholder Interviews
At a Glance
The Challenge
Revenue Administration Solution, a SaaS product for managing revenue tasks like tax administration, compliance, etc. This is a new solution building on their legacy on-prem product, Legacy Premier. Our focus is to make recommendations for the redesign using the MVP property tax use case. The interface will have two main interaction types: a back end for government employees and a front end for civilians. The back end will be slightly different based on the tax type actively being used. Many different role types use the platform, including: data entry, managers, executive summary users, and more. The MVP will only support one use case, but the design needs to scale to adapt to different roles and tax types. This product is used by government employees and consumers, so the interface needs to meet 508 accessibility standards.
Make the collection and processing of money simple and intuitive by focusing on tasks and task management rather than raw data and data associations.
Provide a flexible housing for entities and content being tracked in the system to surface information and relationships associated with specific tasks and past activity.
How We Did It
Discovery Phase
Before any design work began, the team focused on gathering information from stakeholders and users via remote interviews to understand more about the users’ roles and responsibilities, common task flows, context of use, and any pain points with the current product. From these insights we were able to identify recurring themes, framework issues, and opportunities for improvement.
Initial Concepts
With this design direction in mind, the team began generating two concepts to explore a range of different potential solutions, narrowing in on two main concepts:
- Exploratory
- Similar to the original Revenue Premiere solution, the Exploratory concept allows users to view and interact with content in an object-based navigation structure. The information hierarchy is emphasized without the rigidity that required excess navigation, clicks and loading time experienced by users of the original product. Allowing for flexibility in the way data is viewed and interacted with, this solution provides users with the opportunity to explore data in a way that supports the complex data and relationships inherent in tax law.
- Similar to the original Revenue Premiere solution, the Exploratory concept allows users to view and interact with content in an object-based navigation structure. The information hierarchy is emphasized without the rigidity that required excess navigation, clicks and loading time experienced by users of the original product. Allowing for flexibility in the way data is viewed and interacted with, this solution provides users with the opportunity to explore data in a way that supports the complex data and relationships inherent in tax law.
- Guided
- The Guided concept is centered around a task-based approach. Prioritizing the role-specific task flows, users are guided through their work day by a system that knows what they need to do next, and helps them do it. This concept reduces the user’s cognitive load by dynamically tracking the status of their actions/activity instead of making users manually track that information.
Refined Design Direction
After meeting with RSI to get feedback on the initial concepts, the team synthesized a design that takes the best ideas from both designs and implemented them in a way that cohesively fit the needs of the different user types.
The visual language is centered on communicating priority, using color and shape as the primary indicators, while icons are used to track activities and represent objects. The system features an object-based navigation bar on the left with status indicators, dynamic page-specific actions in the top-right corner, and a single global search to simplify the process of finding information. The design includes role-specific dashboards and object pages with expandable reference panels to provide a clear and organized user experience. The overall goal of the visual design is to create a product that is credible and professional yet approachable, with a modern, clean look that adheres to 508 compliance.
The
Outcomes
Outcomes
A task-centered approach to managing mass amounts of data, that anticipates the information and actions necessary for specific roles and tasks, increasing the ease of use, efficiency, and learnability of the system. Relevant contextual and status information is prioritized with supporting data readily available so everyone involved in the system is aware of activity, work to be done, and potential issues. The structure allows users to quickly traverse and act on complex information in a way that feels simple, natural, and adaptable to ever-changing tax requirements.
