Leading interaction design for HMRC on a government digital service
“I worked with Morgana for a year on a Borders & Trade service at HMRC where they were a great team member with a positive can-do attitude. They worked under challenging conditions coming into a well established team and product, but managed to apply their design skills to progress both our process flows and prototypes to an extremely high level.
“They were a great communicator both within the delivery team and with the stakeholder group and built up strong rapports with everyone they came across. It was a pleasure working with them and hopefully we cross paths again in future!”
-Product Owner
Skills Used
Agile
Communication
Community Collaboration
Design Strategy
Evidence-Based Design
Gov.uk Design System
Gov.uk Prototyping Toolkit (HTML/CSS/JavaScript)
Leadership
Presentations
Sketches
User Interviews
User Flows
User Tests
Wireframes — Low/Hi-Fidelity
Working with Policy Stakeholders
In Brief
From March to December 2022 I worked as the Senior Interaction Designer on the EU VAT One Stop Shop. One Stop Shop is a live service for Northern Ireland traders to conduct their VAT payments for all EU member states in one place. The design team consisted of myself, the Senior Content Designer and two User Researchers. With help from my team I made major design improvements on the registration journey, designing the secure messaging system, self-exclusion, VAT group requirements and amendments, along with a host of smaller changes.
Problem 1: VAT Groups
When I joined the OSS team, there was no way for users to tell OSS that they were a part of a VAT group if HMRC did not already have that information. This meant that key registration information would be missing.
Solution 1: VAT Group Checks
The solution had two parts. First the system would check if we already know that the user is part of a VAT group. This way we would not ask an unnecessary question.
Then we ask the user if they are part of a VAT group, only in the case that we do not already know. This then determines what questions we ask them next.
Outcome 1: VAT Group Information Gathered
By asking this question as part of the registration flow, we gathered the information required by HMRC’s legal commitments. Users understood the meaning of VAT groups and completed the expanded registration flow without incident.
Problem 2: Secure Communication Method
Users needed to be able to receive information such as changes to their account or returns to be paid. For this they needed a secure messaging inbox.
Solution 2: Secure Messages Inbox
Working with other design and delivery teams to ensure it was as familiar to users of other HMRC inboxes as possible, I designed the categories for an OSS secure inbox and we added it to the service.
Outcome 2: Secure Informative Messages
We built the new secure message inbox and delivered automated messages which were opened by the majority of users. In user tests they followed CTAs and said that they found the messages to be clear and easy to understand.
Problem 3: Manual Process to Leave Service
Before I joined users had to contact HMRC directly to leave the One Stop Shop service, which took up valuable civil service time.
Solution 3: Deregistration Flow and Deregistered Account Page
I created a flow for users to be able to deregister within the service. At a design crit with interaction designers from across HMRC I gathered feedback to make it match with GDS standards.
I also designed the account page itself for a user who had deregistered but who would still need limited functionality like looking back at old returns.
Outcome 3: Deregistration Workload Ended
After the deregistration process was built, users no longer had to contact the service team to leave the service, and could see that they were deregistered from their account page.
This meant that the service team no longer had to field enquiries related to deregistration.
In Depth — The One Stop Shop Service
Any trader selling goods and services within the EU must submit a VAT (Value Added Tax) return and pay tax in each country they operate within. This means that a business selling in all 27 member states has 27 VAT returns to declare and pay. This is a lot of bureaucracy to manage. For this reason, the EU set up the VAT One Stop Shop scheme.
For traders that sell in multiple countries, all EU member states have a VAT One Stop Shop service where a trader can register in one state and declare and pay all their VAT in one place. In the UK, we also have a One Stop Shop (OSS) service for set up after Brexit for Northern Ireland traders so that they can take advantage of this simplification.
For my part, I make sure that the service is easy to use, accessible for all users and complies with the requirements of the policy team.
Below is a selection of my user-centered designs in three areas. These areas are registration, secure messaging and deregistration.
Registration
When I started as the Interaction Designer on OSS, a version of the registration flow existed in the coded prototype, with flow diagrams which illustrated how the user would navigate it. These diagrams were spread across multiple PDFs and the original design files could not be found. I created a fresh design file which combined all parts of the flow into a single master flow, which could be zoomed in and navigated by anyone inside the service or policy team.
There were some discrepancies between the flow as it worked in the prototype and in the flow diagram, so I made sure to investigate each of these to work out which should be the final version and unified them. In some cases, I could make direct improvements which then went into the next phase of user testing and development.
VAT Groups
The biggest area of design change for the registration flow was around VAT groups (where multiple traders are treated as one for VAT purposes). The policy team required that we gathered more data based on whether a user was part of a VAT group or not, so I expanded the filter questions. There were multiple dependencies here, and getting this part of the flow just right involved consulting extensively with policy and the development team, as well as user testing to ensure that the flow made sense to those using the service.
The dark blue pill nodes represent places where system information determines which screen the user visits next, while the small white pill nodes represent answers. In beige, you can see screens which ask for the same information from users, but where copy is varied based on user input.
I constructed this part of the flow in the interactive coded prototype using the gov.uk prototyping toolkit, so all developers and stakeholders could use a dummy version to test on. This was used in the user research sessions where it passed user testing successfully.
The prototyped screens look identical to in-use government service screens. I can’t share the content because of data protection rules, but here is an example of a screen that I made, with the data removed.
Thanks to the improved registration flow, we are now able to account for any user’s VAT group status and have eliminated our remaining sign-up problems.
Secure Messages
HMRC policy requires that all businesses registered to the One Stop Shop can receive information about their account through HMRC’s secure messaging service. As the Senior Interaction Designer I liaised with other teams to gather requirements around the secure messaging inbox, so that I could create a coded prototype which looked and worked like established patterns, which users were familiar with from their Self Assessment, VAT, corporation and other tax accounts.
I worked with our Senior Content Designer to make sure that all messages were clear and comprehensible and linked back to the correct parts of the service where relevant. As with registration, we iterated with policy to make sure that all messages matched precisely with stakeholder requirements. We then ran user tests on the messages to ensure that users of the service could understand and act on them accordingly.
Messages took various forms. For example when receiving information about their payments, users would get a table which showed their tax reference and their payment details.
When a payment was due, a government green call-to-action button linked them back to the payments page.
The secure messaging system has now passed all user tests and triple policy lock checks, and is currently in the process of development.
Deregistration
Before I designed the deregistration journey, there was no way for any One Stop Shop user to deregister within the service. They would have to email in and get their registration changed by a member of the live team manually. And once the user had deregistered, their account page did not change in any way.
I drafted the deregistration journey so the users could deregister either from their Business Tax Account (BTA) page — where all their business tax accounts like VAT, OSS, Corporation Tax and PAYE can be accessed — or their One Stop Shop account page. Along with the rest of my service team, I talked with the BTA service team to gather requirements and make sure the journey between our connected services was seamless. I then took the journey drafts to a “design crit” session with members of design teams across HMRC. There Interaction Designers, Content Designers and User Researchers looked through the example screens and gave their questions, criticisms and suggestions on post-it notes.
I took this useful feedback and worked with my content designer to smooth out the user flow, ready for testing and then building.
I drafted variations for the user’s account page in various states of registration so I could show how their account would change when registered, deregistered or quarantined. Users need to be able to still log into a deregistered One Stop Shop account, submit their final return and pay any due returns. When deregistered, users could start the re-registration process, but when quarantined they could not.
The Senior Content Designer then reworked my draft copy to bring it up to government standard, and we tested the new functionality at the next usability testing session.
Conclusion
As the Senior Interaction Designer on the EU VAT One Stop Shop, I led on the interaction design of major updates which led to improvements in the service, fulfilling user and policy needs and reducing user errors in the registration process. This was a collaborative process which involved working with other service teams throughout HMRC, as well as consulting on specific and complex design requirements with the policy team. I am grateful for the support of my team throughout the process.
If you want to find out more about my work as a UX consultant please visit my website.
