How did TurboTax convince you that you can do your own taxes?
H ow did TurboTax get 36 million people to trust that they could do their own taxes instead of paying a professional accountant to do it? After all this is painful and time consuming. How can you trust yourself with such a daunting task — shouldn’t you be worried about being audited?
Doing my taxes is not something that I look forward to at all, and I am sure a lot of people also feel that it is a painful experience.
Benjamin Franklin said there were only two things certain in life: death and taxes
Making a user-focused product of this caliber is impressive because many products are built as quickly as possible without a proper design process. Almost every project that I have worked on has been rushed because the higher-ups needed to get the project launched yesterday. These tight deadlines force developers to choose between ease of coding and ease of use, and ease of coding always wins. Counter to intuition, it is exponentially more difficult to code an interface that is perceived as simple to the user than it is to code something that seems complicated. Example: Google Docs collaborative editing is extremely complicated to implement (just google concurrency models).
Taxes are complicated — but TurboTax makes it easy with their empathy-driven user-focused design that is conversational. TurboTax is the holy grail of empathy-driven design, and their business model is only possible because they have invested heavily in understanding their users.
Understanding User Goals and the “Why”?
We need to know why the user is using our product and also their underlying goals and motivations. Sure, people are doing their taxes because they are legally obligated to, but they also have other underlying goals. They want to get credit for their small business, their charitable donations, their new baby, or their recent purchase of a home. Most customers will maximize their tax returns optimally in different ways. As developers, we should also strive to figure out why users are using our product and what they hope to accomplish by using our products.
Guiding Users
TurboTax earns users’ trust with a conversational, step-by-step approach. Too often, products make complicated tasks even more complicated. Users shouldn’t have to worry about answering a question wrong, so they should be able to undo something they did by mistake. TurboTax not only lets you undo something, but it will continually guide you towards the end goal piece by piece.
TurboTax calms my fears and doubts about doing my own taxes even before I start using the product with their FAQ page and helps regular people like me feel OK with doing taxes all on my own. From now on, I am modeling my FAQ pages off of theirs.
This is the best sort of FAQ page because it presents common worries that people may have about using the product (doing their own taxes) and lets them know that they will be guided through this process step-by-step with easy-to-answer questions. It also lets them know that the software will do its number crunching magic behind the scenes and get them the best return possible.
It is easy to see that TurboTax’s investment into user experience pays off since more and more people are doing their own taxes. No one did their own taxes before because it was simply too painful and complicated. But by investing in your customers experience with a proper design process you will create a product that is desirable and solves real problems. That is where the business opportunities and real value are — so look to your users and make their lives better so your business thrives.
