Cameron Henkes
Product Design
When I joined Taxfix in 2020, I did so remotely all the way from Australia until COVID would allow me to relocate to Berlin.
An important project I took over was prefilling tax returns. Prefill is data held by the tax office that is reported by third parties. In Germany, this information is from employer, insurance providers, health fund and various others. This information is incredibly valuable as it not only can reduce the amount of time users spend preparing their return, but also do it in an accurate way. It was a great tool in allowing building the good retention CVR.
Senior Product Designer
2021
Fintech
Exploring how might we improve
Accessing government services in Germany is often over-complicated for no reason. The challenge we had to deal with was the retrieval of the data which had to be done in 3 unique journey stages:
Opt-in – When the user opts in we would send a request to the tax office. The tax office would send the user a unique code via post. Typically, this would take 7-10 business days, but when tax season is open, this can take up to 3 weeks.
Entering the code – When the user receives their code, they enter it into the app which is validated in almost real-time.
Preparing their return - After 48 hours, we typically receive the users data after which they can start their return with prefill data.
We allowed the users to opt into the prefill feature first to first understand whether this it was viable product direction. Following user feedback closely and CS conversation, we evolved the experience design.
After 3 weeks of iterating, testing and reviewing, we finally arrived a solution. While we could've taken additional time and resources to validate a more comprehensive list of hypothesis, we wanted to learn by getting something there as soon as possible and talk to users who are using a the feature to iterate it best.
The original focus in the first iteration was communicating the key benefits of prefill and encouraging users to opt-in.
After hearing from users who experienced the full journey of prefill, we discovered that users were more confused on what happens in each stage.
To overcome this, I chose to add a mini-onboarding style journey so users could better understand what the experience would entail.
What we delivered within a quarter were huge improvements to the user experience. Delivering most within 3 weeks.
Achieved an opt-in rate of 44% in first release
13 key product improvements
5 feature-ready concepts for next quarter
Improved user experience
Designing for an English and a German version can be a challenge as a German copy is always a lot longer than the English version. For example, in English what we described as "Prefill" was "Datenabruf." This had to be kept in mind when designing.
When I first started on the project, we had an enormous amount of user research and CS data, but nothing offering a combined view of the journey. We had no joint understanding across our stakeholders how users felt and where our pain points were. We were only guessing. So that's what I did, I combined all the research to together to form a picture of our current experience and planned our future activities from there.
As the team was situated across the globe, I held ideation sessions with a wide range of stakeholders (developers, content designers and tax experts) to best explore how we could best integrate pre-fill into our product whilst providing the best user experience.
Before I onboarded to the project, communication had been a key issue in preventing project success. To overcome the existing hurdles, I used the following techniques within these sessions:
Affinity clustering: clearly identified the core problems in the user's prefill journey
Crazy 8s: exposed gaps in the group's perception of the journey
Dot voting : created a consensus on our approach, and when paired with a why, ultimately created a common understanding of the end-solutionAll of these techniques (combined with some others) was a super effective method of getting everyone on the same page and pushing the project into a more mature state.
There were so many chefs in the kitchen. From C-level, heads of departments through to developers and other peer designers. After some iterating on how concepts were presented, I delivered all concepts in a prototype and moved away from showcasing static designs. This really helped our stakeholders to think about the user, to build on the empathy.
Presenting back users insight during the prototype help our stakeholders give more quality feedback to real user problems.
Presenting in a prototype will not only help stakeholder think more about the journey the user will have to go through, but it also helps you gather more quality feedback as your stakeholder think more about the user journey.
From limited users research resources (I dont speak German and it has to done in German) to unknown complexities with the German Tax Office, I approach each issue according to a risk score; Drop Everything, Prioritise for next Sprint, Next available.
This would help us to make sure we dedicated resources to the areas that needed it.
When you're limited to doing research, reach out to CS and gather conversation data. Put them on post it notes and start clustering them together. You'll start seeing trends quickly and cheaply.
