Context and Challenge

How might we improve the taxpayer experience and reduce taxpayer anxiety for veteran-owned, woman-owned and minority-owned small businesses?

Definitions

“Improve the taxpayer experience” – identify concrete opportunities towards creating better experiences related to preparing, filing and paying taxes.

“reduce taxpayer anxiety” – addresses the significant challenges faced by this population in comparison to other businesses that stem from social and cultural stigmas, family and child-rearing responsibilities, maternity needs, educational background, career experience, and community support.

“veteran-owned, woman-owned and minority-owned businesses” – addresses the needs of businesses that are at least 51% owned by veterans, women, or minorities.

My Role

I worked in a team with five other people. I took the lead on the insights gathering/sense-making portion of the design process.

Discovery and Insights

My team chose to work with women-owned small businesses for this project. Through our empathic interviews with users, we came across a multitude of emotions, ranging from anxiety to frustration to uncertainty regarding the tax-paying process.

These emotions also came across in our affinity map:

Based on this research, we also created a sample journey map of a potential user: a multi-racial woman in her mid-30s, Saylor, who wanted to start a small business giving IT consulting to education non-profits. This brought out specific concerns regarding understanding the tax-paying process and getting feedback on whether or not she was following all the right steps.

It is based on this entire discovery phase that we encountered two personas:

We realized that there were female business owners like Annie that had become worn down and were resigned to the fact that the tax system was not built for her. There were also women like Cassie who are newer business owners and do not want to be seen as different. This led us to our underpinning insight for our solution, which is that women want to be seen, but not demeaned.

Roadmap to Pain Point Alleviation

Based on our discovery phase, we were looking to create a concept that alleviated the following pain points:

We alleviated these pain points in the following ways:

Prototype

Meet Village! A solution that solves for your functional needs AND your emotional needs. Here’s how it works. 

Profile

Profile creation enables the app to provide a customized experience and collect data that leads to improvements for the small business tax-paying process, particularly for women-owned small businesses since there is less data available for these entities.

Control Deck

The Control Deck imports information from related applications such as QuickBooks and Expensify to automatically prepare your taxes for you, alleviating the anxiety around the tax-paying process.

Once information from all apps are integrated, users can then see all of their important documents in one place and view a timeline. This will elucidate the tax-paying process and cut down on time wasted searching for relevant documents.

Notifications

Users will be able to turn on push notifications which can help them to feel supported in what is usually a process full of second-guessing oneself. Furthermore, notifications can also be in the form of reminders or to check up on potential errors.

Creating a Community

The Village Voice feature resembles a newsfeed showing activity from people in a user’s network. For example, a user may see a friend who got a women-owned business tax credit, and this person may be encouraged to find out more. This can also be another way to show users that they are not alone in the tax-paying process.

Challenges

If we had more time, we would have built out the app further and tested the prototype with more users. However, given the time we had, we created the highest fidelity prototype we could and tested it with as many people as our time allowed.

Results

This pitch was presented at the Summer of Design Final Showcase in Washington DC to Human Centered Design Professionals from Booz Allen Hamilton that consult with the Federal government as well as employees from the IRS. My team won the Audience Choice Award.