That Time of Year Again, Tax Season with Turbo: A Product Review
Any damn fool can make something complex, it takes a genius to make something simple.
– Pete Seeger, Product Director at Docusign
The most brilliant and enduring products are the ones that are not additive, but subtractive. They make life simpler. There is beauty in a great product’s ability to make a mundane or odious task, enjoyable, easy, or even fun.
This is why I want to tell you about my newest love affair. My taxes.
As a millennial, I’ve only filed my own taxes a handful of times. My first attempt proved to be a real headache. At 23, I was left with the daunting task of reconciling grant money I received in Taiwan with my first real salary as a working professional in DC. I spent hours on the phone with my parents going through documents line by line. I even had a “practice” tax form in which I filled out the entirety of my filing in pencil and then went back through on a second copy to write in the actual amounts once I was sure that I was doing everything correctly.
Each year as I’ve moved across the countries or across states, accumulated different financial assets, and thought about making big moves like getting married or starting my own business or investing in Crypto, it has seemed like a more and more daunting task.
Enter TurboTax.
Now, each year I feel confident in my ability to do my taxes. TurboTax has completely changed the ubiquitously challenging and confusing citizen experience. It makes the experience easy, painless and straightforward. Now, every January, it’s something — I’m embarrassed to admit — I even look forward to it.
What is Turbotax and what are its goals?
TurboTax is e-filing tax preparation software for the United States and Canada. The software walks users through the tax preparation process step-by-step. It offers differentiated products for individuals and businesses and allows users to file both their state and federal tax returns online.
Disclaimer: I’ve never used TurboTax Deluxe or Home & Business software — this article is about the basic individually-purposed version of TurboTax.
The product is owned by Intuit whose mission is to “Power Prosperity Around the World”. In 2017, more than 52M people filed self-prepared tax returns electronically, the number has only increased in the last year. Intuit’s TurboTax prepared 40 million of those, which simplifies to about 2 out of every 3 people. H&R Block in comparison handled just 6.8 million digital returns in the U.S., and 12.3 million customers in its physical stores. The company is at the forefront of the e-filing industry. It’s been the pioneer in the e-filing business from the start, transforming the experience of filing and paying our taxes, taking a common and ugly problem and making it easy.
Why is it so great?
It has a value proposition for a wide variety of users, but is especially attractive for tech-savvy millennials, like me, looking for a headache-free technologically seamless process. There are three major reasons that it has changed the entire process for me and added value to my life:
- User Experience: A delightfully pleasant user experience, that feels like a conversation
- Saves Money: Peace of mind that you are filing correctly and getting the most out of your tax return
- Saves Time: Minimizes time needed and requires no follow up
Below, I’ll explain why I’m in love with TurboTax’s approach to product management based on these three tenets; UX, money and time. I’ll include some interesting tidbits about the product’s evolution and conclude with some ideas about how to improve the product in the future.
User Experience
Display information: TurboTax displays information as cleanly and clearly as possible. It keeps its aesthetic attractive by keeping it simple: simple colors, simple graphics, and simple questions. It’s clear that TurboTax has thought through not only how it simplifies a complex process, but also how it displays it. TurboTax is careful not to add any additional complications to the mix.
User Flow: TurboTax intentionally only asks you bite-sized pieces of information about yourself. It is easy to tackle each step and therefore easy to feel like you are making progress. This helps to keep you motivated and prevents you from feeling overwhelmed. It flows through information in an intentional and approachable way, starting with the easy things (like your name and marital status)first. You gain momentum and maintain energy to get through the more challenging questions. This tactic is called the Endowed Progress Effect, providing a sense of advancement toward a goal thereby increasing your motivation to actually complete your tax filing. Creating this sense of accomplishment is HUGE for a process that is so detested.
It helps the user to orient themselves. For inexperienced tax filers, it gives you a heads up on what is coming next and what to expect, so you can gather the information you need. In this way, you don’t feel blindsided or surprised by questions.
If you want to skip ahead, you can jump from section to section using the menu at the top of the screen. If you need to stop, you can easily close your window and come back later. If you get lost, you can re-enter guided-mode. You can also bookmark/flag a page to go back to later if you don’t have the information or time at the moment and want to set a reminder for yourself. At the core of the interface is also its ability to feel continuous. Although you move from section to section, the screen itself doesn’t feel like it’s changing, just the content moving in and out.
Tone: TurboTax takes a conversational tone, using common language and colloquialisms. It feels like you are talking to a friend instead of a tax accountant. Instead of asking you what major life events have happened, it asks to “catch up”. It congratulates you for getting married. It encourages you to keep going!
It is clear that TurboTax invested a lot in understanding its customers and how they engage with the tax-filing experience. From the small things, such as wording of questions, to the big things, like color scheme, the platform feels friendly, clean and easy to use.
Saves Money
TurboTax guarantees that your taxes are done right and that you are getting your maximum refund. This is a major concern for individuals who are new to tax filing or don’t haven’t yet acquired financial autonomy or fluency. TurboTax’s guarantee gives you peace of mind that you are getting the most out of your tax return and aren’t leaving money on the table.
As an incentive and a monitoring mechanism, it even has a little dashboard on the top left-hand corner that updates as you move through the process. It shows you your tax refund for both State and Federal and updates in real time. This gives the you a sense of how your financial and tax decisions might change your filing status and connect that with a financial benefit or cost. Similar to showing your progress through the process, it monetarily incentivizes you to stay with TurboTax as you can clearly see the financial benefit.
TurboTax provides a lot of additional support if you aren’t sure that you are getting the most out of your return. You can chat with a chatbot, for example, to get answers to some of your questions answered in realtime.
As a second and third resort, you can search through TurboTax’s reservoir of articles or posit a question to TurboTax’s impressive community of users who answer complex tax questions. If you Google a tax question, TurboTax’s community likely comes up as a top answer. This makes TurboTax a one stop shop for any tax question you might need.
Lastly, if you are still confused you can upgrade to TurboTax Live. Through this upgraded option you can connect to a Certified Public Account (CPA) for personalized tax advice. To file with TurboTax Live, it costs $149.99* for federal taxes, and an additional $36.99 for your state taxes.
Tax laws change frequently, and credits come and go, so TurboTax’s continuously updated software stays on top of how changing tax environments affect your tax return. Here TurboTax shines because it takes the time to explain what it means for your taxes rather than just what it means for taxes in general. It is transparent about the calculations and reasons it is making suggestions, which empowers the user to feel in control.
Save Time
TurboTax saves you time. TurboTax lets you access and work on your return across devices. You can start your return on your computer and then continue to add and edit on your phone or tablet. Now you can import your W-2 information from your employer, but you can also take a photo of the form from your phone. All this data is transferred to your account in a seamless way so you get the same experience across devices.
TurboTax is sticky. By remembering your information, it saves you time entering your basic demographics over and over again. It remembers where you worked last year, and can fill in some fields for you. This makes it possible to almost take off where you left off and harder to switch to another tax filing platform which may make you start all over again.
It makes payment timely and direct. For payment, the easiest option is to simply subtract the TurboTax preparation fees from your federal tax refund and have the remaining balance deposited directly into your bank account. No worrying about receiving a check in the mail or making a separate transfer to a tax accountant.
Another option is to have your refund loaded onto a TurboTax Prepaid Visa Card. Now TurboTax will even up your refund by up to 10% if you load the amount to an Amazon e-gift card. These options make the transaction easy and singular. You don’t have to follow-up and it integrates easily into your digital financial life. After you file, you can easily track your tax return online or on your phone with our TurboTax mobile app to know when your refund has been received.
So, what else can it improve?
Even great product experiences have room for improvement. The following are a few suggestions I have that might enhance the experience based on my own personal tax-filing challenges.
- Build connection: Humans like to feel like they have support through every step of the process from someone they know and trust. People feel closer and more connected to something that resembles something more human than machine. Giving the automated chatbot a name and persona could make it seem like a more personalized and more personable experience.
- Build a relationship: TurboTax now has a good amount of time series data. Similar to how Intuit’s other product Mint works, TurboTax could develop a way to visualize the savings and data that you have had over time as TurboTax builds a relationship with you. It could both highlight the long term savings that you’ve had, but also speak to you like a Facebook “year in review” video does, highlighting your tax saving victories and achievements.
- Build partnerships: Increase partnerships so you can spend your tax refund at places that you want. TurboTax has already opened the door with Amazon, but allowing a benefit for using your refund at specific companies is a great incentive for customers and partners. As a user, it feels personal and can tie into my interests and hobbies, and for companies it is a great way to channel customers to their storefront.
In Conclusion
In a world without TurboTax, we spent hours filling out forms manually, lost money calculating returns incorrectly and felt perpetually upset with the process. TurboTax has revolutionized the tax filing industry. It’s a product that has made a unpleasant experience pleasant and accessible. TurboTax has its free version, as well as discounted versions for veterans. In addition, it has a wealth of tax-oriented educational content.
Tax season is a particular vulnerable time in a person’s life because of the magnitude of money that is involved in the process. In many’s lives it’s one of the only moments in the year that they dedicate substantial time to thinking about their financial situation.
“Consumers spend 6 billion hours each year using software to prepare their income taxes; anything we can do to reduce that time will be a gift. At the end of the process, most taxpayers are owed a refund — and for 70% of them, that refund is the single largest check they’ll receive during the year. In this context we began to think less about the pure functionality of our software and more about the emotional payoff of reducing drudgery and speeding the way toward a big windfall.” — Scott Cook
TurboTax makes it easy though no matter who I am to feel empowered in my own financial decision making, transforming an activity that is burdensome into one that is a gift.