So what’s the problem?
With the pandemic some unexpected problems changed the way Tax Preparers worked. Many of our customers still relied on their tax clients signing wet signatures and sending via mail or coming into their firms to sign in person. But that changed with the pandemic. The CRA opened up the rules for eSignature for more eSignature. With the changes in rules and behaviors this quickly turned into a top feature request for our customers and 71% of our customers sited eSignature as their top feature request for our tax products.
As well, our tax professionals have many apps to get the work done. Including eSignature solutions that can get expensive and cost them time when they’re workflow is disrupted taking more time and human error. This was a necessary problem to solve for our retention and acquisition customers.
We heard from our Tax Pro’s that their tax clients that sign documents often need tech support. Those that do use solutions already find that their tax clients forget their passwords, they need reminding, and some are older and need more support.Tax pro’s spend more time being ‘IT support’ instead of focusing on their work in a very busy tax season. The solution needed to be dead easy.
“These solutions that we've kind of looked into all cost a lot of money, and so we'll eventually get there. I guess we have to pay it once, you know, if we have another kind of cataclysmic situation come up as well, we will be forced to do it. But anything that integrates into what we already use right now would be helpful.”
Pro Tax Accountant customer
Users and audience
Professional tax preparers and bookkeepers from multi-service and single service firms, sole proprietors.
Tax clients who sign the tax documents.
Roles and responsibilities
Design lead and driver of the E2E experience to target launch agnostic to other Intuit businesses and future states including:
Discovery of the problem
Here we determine your customer problem, decide on a goal, and define success metrics together. Through internal and external research, competitive analysis, analogies, co-creation of schemas and workflows and internal and external In Depth interviews.
Explore the solution
Here’s where we test and iterate to find the best avenues of approach. By going broad through roadmap surveys, sketching, low fidelity concepts rapid prototyping and testing throughout. We’re iterating to our high fidelity solution.
Refine the solution
We partner with PD and others more often to build your designs as we continue to iterate. We went narrow to refine the designs and get to a speck design source of truth and dig into the unhappy paths with rigor to reduce as much churn as possible for our developer partners
The process: how we did it
We worked in the triple diamond approach starting with discovery of the problem, to evaluate the desirability of eSignature integrated into our Pro Tax cloud product and Profile desktop product. We relied on customer backed testing and research starting from our Innovation design week and partnering with our developers in their global engineering days to prove we can technically do it. This early discovery process included usage metrics in conjunction with 350+ screen designs and 12+ prototypes from low to high fidelity with an average love metric of 9 out of 10.This allowed us to gain a deeper understanding by combining both qualitative and quantitative information. We quickly discovered additional insights to the tax preparers workflow to bring delight and time savings into our eSignature solution. By continuing to go broad and narrow and partnering with our developers, subject matter experts, marketing, sales and more folks along the way in key co-creation moments and reviews we launched our target solution within a year from conception.
Scope and constraints
We have a short time to get eSignature ready for tax season with enough time to test and adopt our solution. Our tax pro’s have a small amount of time and need something that will work in season. As well, we’re a small team that needed our partners across three different countries to commit to work with us to launch in time for both our online and desktop products. By leaning into the process, leveraging innovation week and our global engineering days in a very scrappy way we were able to bring folks into our design process early and often which helped us get commitment from other teams to launch successfully.
Outcome and lessons
We launched a new Intuit product called Intuit signed! It’s integrated into the Tax Pro’s workflow and the design is agnostic enough of a design to solve for other Intuit business units.
It’s early days but our customers have shared their excitement. In the latter prototype testing many customers noted that this feature could save 2-3 minutes to their workflow time because of the integrated experience which really adds up in the tax season. One customer who has purchased stated that this solution will ‘save him 5k’. The first purchase of Intuit Sign was within one hour of our first marketing email.
“I have been holding off on another product add-on within QuickBooks so I am excited for this to become active and I have been chatting with some of my friends about this and they were looking forward to adding this to their upcoming year.”
Bookkeeping and Tax Preparer
Bookkeeping and Tax Preparer
