1. The Challenge: Our biggest retention product wasn't retaining anymore

The Tax Payment flow was the main reason for users to use our app because they needed to pay their taxes monthly, and because of that the Tax Payment flow was the most important product in terms of retention.

Throughout 2020, we saw that the number of people accessing the Tax Payment flow decreased, in addition to a significant increase in complaints about the product, ranging from duplicated payments to not knowing that they had past-due taxes to pay.

We went from having 83% of all active users paying their taxes in January 2020 to only 71% in September 2020, so it's a huge decrease.

We thought about two main reasons why this has happened:

1. The 2020 economic instability due to the pandemic led a lot of small businesses to lose their source of income for a long period, so they weren't able to pay their taxes;
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2. The UX of the Tax Payment flow had lots of already known usability problems.

1.1 Technical & Business Constraints

On the main screen of the app, you could see the last 2 taxes and their statuses, but the thing is: the statuses you’re seeing may be out-of-date.

This happens because the app had no direct communication with the government to present the updated statuses automatically. To update them, you needed to access the Tax Payment list and tap on the “Update payments” button. This way you would send a backend request to search for new payments.

Every update request had a cost to the business, so updating the statuses wasn’t free. This means that updating all users in our user base wasn’t a scalable solution, and this was a technical constraint that we needed to work within.

In conclusion, if the user is checking their payment status only through the main screen, they’re probably seeing outdated payment statuses.

1.2 Design problems

Showing out-of-date statuses wasn’t the only problem. Some other problems were:

• Low color contrast: Lots of yellow copy and light blue background.
• Information Architecture problems: The most important information wasn’t the first to be read.
• Use of components for purposes other than expected: A primary button was being used to navigate to previous years.
• Outdated design: We needed to work within the constraints of using Google’s Material Design System, but improvements could still be made to the UI.

1.3 Our goal: Increase retention again

With all the constraints and usability problems in mind, we defined our main goal:

2. Discovery

2.1 Certainties, Suppositions, and Doubts: Finding Common Ground

To guide the next steps of our research, we gathered the team (PM, engineers, QA), stakeholders, and customer support to use a framework called CSD Matrix. This framework helps to outline and visualize what everyone involved in a project knows (Certainties), hypothesizes (Suppositions), and doesn't know yet (Doubts), which are the 3 columns of the matrix that we filled together.

The CSD matrix encompasses various types of knowledge, including user needs and behaviors, as well as organizational factors such as goals, processes, technology, and constraints.

The CSD Matrix: First is certainties, second is suppositions and last are the doubts. Tool: EasyRetro

With the matrix ready, I created a new board and put everything that was written on post-its to analyze what would be the best way to explore the doubts or validate the suppositions, separating between Qualitative Research, Quantitative Research, Analytics, Usability Testing, and others.

The board where I organized the post-its.

2.2 Desk research: Benefits and Consequences

I’ve found out through desk research and talking to our accountants that paying taxes regularly has many benefits to the entrepreneur such as retirement pension, paid maternity leave, and so on. But, there are also downsides to not paying the tax, such as the interest rate for past-due taxes, and government debt which can even lead to revoking their business license.

2.3 Data Analysis: Paying Habits

With the help of our Data Analyst, we’ve discovered that:

2.4 User interviews: Deep dive into their habits and feelings

2.4.1 Interview Goals and Profile

Based on the insights we got from the discovery so far, we defined the user interview goals:

I created the interview script and together with our UX Researcher we decided on the user profiles to recruit:

2.4.2 User Interview Insights

2.5 Competitive Analysis: Everyone is doing the same thing

I looked at the biggest competitors that offer tax payment and discovered that so far, we had almost no advantage when compared to them, and all services were very similar, even in their problems. They didn’t provide real-time updates of payments or an easy way to view all past-due taxes.

A table comparing the main players and their features.

3. Define

3.1 Macro-problems: Payment Status & Debt

After the discovery we defined two macro-problems that we have in our current flow and prioritized them in order of relevance, according to our research and data:

3.2 Micro-problems: Breaking Down Improvements

4. Develop

4.1 Design Critiques & Co-creation

At Neon, we had a Design System based on Material Design, and I used it to create our new tax flow.I created several versions of the screens and did 3 rounds of design critiques with other designers to get improvement insights and vote on which version was the best. Each round generated a lot of comments and together we co-created ideas.

After the third review, I iterated the screens and showed them to the development team to understand the technical feasibility and gather more feedback. Finally, together with the PM, we decided which would be the final interface to be taken to usability testing.

5. Deliver: Final screens

With the usability tests finished, I did the last iterations and decided on the final screens to go to MVP.I used Neon's Design System to create the screens, which is based on Google’s Material Design.

5.1 Tax list

We’re now updating payments automatically. It was technically feasible and financially viable for the business to prioritize updating users who accessed the Tax List screen, this way we wouldn’t need to update the whole user base, only the ones that tapped to go to this screen.

• We’ve chosen to use the headline to summarize the payment status of all taxes in one sentence, which can be “You’re up to date with your taxes” if they don’t have any debts, or “You have past due taxes”, to quickly inform the user so they can take action on it.
• We kept the “Update status” button on the screen in case something unforeseen happens in the automatic update, giving users the freedom to request an update.
• We’ve added the date and time of the last update to be more transparent.
• To help users stay out of debt, we’ve included a button that reports the total of past due taxes that lead to a screen with a history of overdue taxes.
• We’ve also included a button that reports total taxes paid to help them understand when they can claim the benefits that the tax offers, as found in desk research.
  ‍By prioritization, these two history screens have not been included in MVP and have not yet been released.

• The sort of the list has also changed: past due taxes are presented first for greater visibility, helping the user to quickly identify them. These are followed by ready-to-pay taxes, and finally, paid taxes at the bottom of the list.
• I also helped to create a FAQ page based on customer support requests and on research findings. The button to access it is on the header, represented by a “?” icon.
• The amount due of the tax is the same throughout the year, and because of that we chose to not present it on the list - it would be repetitive.

5.2 Tax details

• I’ve optimized the information architecture so that the main focus is the amount due, being the first thing to be seen.
• The tax payment status is just below the amount so the user is quickly informed, and is followed by the due date.
• We added the clearing time for greater transparency.
• Finally, the tax payment code and the button to pay it with our bank are presented, both now adapted to our design system. The share button was decreasing in clicks, so I moved it to the header to make room for more important information and frequently used actions.
• The FAQ button has also been included in the header.

5.3 Usability testing

Together with our UX Researcher, I defined the task success and the usability testing goals, and finally, I recruited active clients to participate in the test.

Main insights:

• They shared that the tax list is now more organized;
• Everyone immediately noticed the past-due taxes at the top of the list, which showed us that we were able to achieve our goal of giving them more visibility by changing the sorting;
• Only half of the users used the update button, bringing up the issue that we can’t rely on user action alone to update payment status, and that’s why we added automatic updates;
• The button panel displaying the number of past due and paid taxes was successfully noticed by all users;
• The tax detail screen was browsed by users without any problems.

5.4 Final flow: Covering over 15 new edge cases

After validating the prototype with users, I designed the entire screen flow with business rules and edge cases, where over 15 new edge cases were added.

Screenshot of the complete flow.

I found error messages that were being communicated as generic errors such as “Oops, something went wrong” instead of providing honest feedback to the user about what happened and what they can do about it.

Some error messages that we added.

6. Business Impact: +10% increase in Retention

As of this writing, the redesign of the tax flow has had a positive impact on our users and business:

• We noticed an increase in the number of active users in the tax flow, a number that was gradually falling over the previous year. We increased the product’s retention by more than 10%.
• Automatically updating the tax statuses meant that all users were always up to date (100%) when accessing the list, thus avoiding breaking their trust.
• We also noticed an increase in demand for our Accounting service that offers the installment of past due taxes with the government, concluding that with the new interface that shows the total past due taxes we were able to bring visibility to these old debts that were forgotten and not seen.