Redesigning the Payroll Tax Center
Providing more control and visibility over taxes — and enabling a critical business goal
Role: Lead designer
Focus: Product Strategy, Research, UI/UX
Timeline: March 2020 — Present
Status: Shipped
Impact: $29M increase in revenue per year
CONTEXT
About QuickBooks Payroll
QuickBooks Online Payroll is a software for small business owners and accountants that helps manage business, pay employees, and pay and file payroll taxes.
My Responsibilities
I’ve been working as the design lead on the Payroll Tax mission. I partner closely with my content strategist, product manager, engineers, and tax ops and compliance team members to investigate how to enhance existing experiences and plan both short and long term for our product strategy.
Payroll Competitive Landscape
Many of our competitors including Gusto, Square, and OnPay offer automated tax payments and filings utilizing a concept called ‘tax impounding’, where payroll tax liabilities are automatically deducated for each paycheck which limits small business cash flow.
Current Experience
We are able to stay competitive amongst our competitors because we offer two ways to handle taxes, either manually or automatically. Users have more control over when the cash is leaving their bank accounts.
Exclusively supports manually handled taxes
Exclusively supports automated taxes
Why Redesign the Payroll Tax Center?
Maintaining two distinct and legacy tax experiences across our product teams was costing us up to $28M per year
Missed growth opportunities as a result of work redundancies and inefficiencies working with our older tech stacks.
Customers have expressed frustration with our payroll tax experience
No visibility over tax payment and filing statuses and no way to switch been automated and non-automated versions.
PROCESS
Product Goals
Goal 1: Build a robust and unified Payroll Tax Center experience capable of supporting both automated and manually handled tax liabilities.
Goal 2: Give users the ability to turn on or off payroll tax automation whenever they want.
Goal 3: Provide more transparency and visibility over payroll tax statuses.
Research
We conducted user interviews to better understand our customer workflows and mental models when handling payroll taxes. I also partnered closely with my Tax Ops and Compliance teams to understand how payroll taxes work.
User Interview Insights
Automated customers don’t log into QuickBooks regularly
1. Likely have their payroll automated as well
2. Don’t expect anything to go wrong with their account (bank connection, expired subscription, etc.)
Non-automated customers treat their taxes like a checklist
1. Don’t feel confident in their understanding of how taxes work
2. Act upon open tax liabilities but feel like they’re left in the dark afterwards
Understanding Tax Timelines
Design Variations
Exploring how tax statuses can be leveraged to drive the new Tax Center experience
FINAL DESIGNS
Landing Page
After much ideating and user testing around how we could use meaningful statuses to drive the Tax Center experience, we aligned on the following designs.
ADDITIONAL DESIGNS
Payroll Settings
I worked in collaboration with the Payroll Settings Team to deliver the new ability to turn on or off automated payroll taxes.
Loading State
We were seeing about a 5 second load time with a lot of data to load onto our page. We designed a skeleton loading state which has been proven to reduce the perception around waiting.
Tax Payment
I redesigned this flow to be within a drawer component on top of the Tax Center, reducing the amount of whitespace and making the flow more readable and accessible.
Mark as Paid
Previously, users needed to manually enter taxes that they’ve already paid. I made it easier by introducing a ‘Mark as paid’ button with which a user can easily let us know that they’ve already paid it.
Enforcing Compliance
There are cases when there is a strict order in which taxes must be paid. In order to prevent any complications later down the road, we support the logic and experience to guide users towards the right order of action.
Payroll Overview
I worked in collaboration with the Overview Page Team to clean up and consolidate the tax liabilities listed on the To Do section.
RESULTS AND IMPACT
Target State Experience
With the new Payroll Tax Center in place, we were able to sunset two legacy tax experiences and begin focusing on our target state tax experience. The improved efficiency and productivity in our product teams is anticipated to accelerate revenue earnings by $28M beginning in 2021.
Tax Exceptions Volume
After launching the new Payroll Tax Center, we saw a 70% decrease in tax exceptions volume bringing the numbers down from 100,000 to 30,000 in just the first month. The new ability for automated tax customers to handle manual taxes on their own in the Payroll Tax Center saves our business $1M in costs per year.
LEADERSHIP SUPPORT
Payroll SVP Laurent Sellier during QuickBooks Connect
Our SVP Laurent showed strong support for our new and improved Payroll Tax Center experience during QuickBooks Connect, an annual conference for accountants and small business owners.
LEARNINGS & REFLECTION
Think beyond the in-product experience
When it comes to an area like taxes, we learned that it isn’t just about in-product messaging and a clean interface that will create the best experience for users. We need to look at it more holistically and think about how we might user other touch points with the customer such as email, text, etc.