The three pillars of user experience design at Taxfix

Shaleah Dawnyel, Ellen Sigloch, and Janine Hofmann share a behind-the-scenes look at our Design Team. Read how this recently ramped-up team is finding creative ways to stay connected and get closer to our users.

If you’re familiar with the Taxfix product, then you’re familiar with our Design Team’s work. But what you may not know is that the Design Team as a whole has gone through an incredible growth phase. What started as a scrappy team of three product designers back in 2016 has skyrocketed to a total headcount of 14 in just the past six months.

Rebecca Coleman, Head of Design, began ramping up the team after joining in November 2019. As a scaling startup, the need for defined disciplines within Design was clear. UX research, content design, and product design all came with their own unique set of challenges and needed special expertise to address them. Thus the three sub-teams within Taxfix Design were born.

Meet three members of our Design Team and learn more about how their work brings us closer to our users:

User Experience

Ellen Sigloch, UX researcher — “My goal is to bring the voice of our users back to the company. I communicate user needs, pain points, and ideas to product managers and the business development team. It’s all about translating user stories into product features or new ideas to ensure that our product continues to solve a real-life problem.

“You can think of UX Research as an internal service. I touch base on a daily basis with very different departments. I also work closely with the product designers when it comes to concept testing, evaluation, and discovery topics. Communication is key. There’s a lot to keep track of, from making sure everyone is in the loop for a particular project to acquiring study participants to interviewing them. I’m also trying to reorganize the way research works here and looking for new ways to make research more approachable and exciting.”

Content Design

Shaleah Dawnyel, English content designer — “My main goals are to improve the level of English language communication both internally for our staff and externally for our users. I work primarily in the Product Team to create intuitive and clear end-to-end user experiences. Every day is different, sometimes I’m working on screens for new initiatives, sometimes I’m in meetings with tax experts or marketing team members to develop new resources for our users. The variety is really part of the fun. I recently published a student tax guide. It’s the first English resource produced by Taxfix.

“Content is the type of invisible thing that you only notice when it goes very badly. In my experience, the best content designers can see the forest and the trees in their work. This position really understands the interplay between the human aspects, the business aspects, and the actual content itself. The ability to derive context rapidly is what separates a copywriter from a content designer. And the ability to create and execute strategy inside of a user experience is what separates a decent content designer from a great one.”

Product Design

Janine Hofmann, senior product designer — “I’ve been with Taxfix from the beginning and for a long time there was only one designer — me. My task is to understand our customers’ needs in order to create solutions that enable them to do taxes with ease and maybe even enjoy their journey. From the initial research to the final designs, I’m part of the process.

“We usually start with a kick-off meeting to define the goals of the project and the initial milestones. We collect ideas and questions or concerns to raise. Depending on the scope of the project we also conduct user research and internal research. For a product designer, this step is vital because it allows you to empathize with the user. After synthesizing the research we usually do some ideation workshops on how to translate the outcomes into designs. We test those and whittle our ideas down to an MVP — minimum viable product — that we then further break down into A/B experiments. After implementation, we continue to iterate over time.”

What unites the Design Team?

Janine — “At the core, all teams within Design are linked by the idea of human-centered design. This means design decisions are not based solely on business needs or taste, but rather on the user’s needs. What problems do they face? What emotions play into these issues? What motivates them? With this perspective in mind, the user becomes the hero of their own story.”

How do you stay connected while working remotely?

Shaleah — “The first content designers joined in December 2019, so our initial quarter was crazy busy. Now in Q2, with the entire team working remotely, we wanted to find a fun way to let us all share a bit of ourselves with each other.

Bec, our Head of Design, came up with the idea of the Joy Project.”

The Joy Project — An inter-team auction of unique services and products organized using Jamboard.

“We all offered up different services, like writing a limerick, creating a custom cocktail, or a personalized houseplant consultation. And then we each got 100 Design Dollars — Monopoly money — to bid on the items. There was cross-stitch, kimchi, an Italian lasagna video tutorial. We even had pâté made by one of the content designer’s French grandmothers. That was one of the highest bid on items, everyone wanted it!

That’s how we keep the team spirit together. We’re so diverse, we’re really coming from all different kinds of places. It’s interesting to share those things together because it activates the creativity and the problem solving we need in order to face our challenges.

What challenges are you currently facing?

Janine — “This environment is really fast-paced. Here you’re doing research projects often while you’re working on other projects, which can be difficult. We’re getting more resources, so this will change over time, but you cannot expect to always follow the ideal process. You have to improvise, you have to be creative, you have to think about how we can spend less time and get the most out of it.”

Ellen — “We’re currently designing the Design Team. There’s a lot of challenges coming together right now, which makes it very interesting. There’s the challenge of doing the work, organizing the work, and organizing the work between each other. We’re still in that learning process, where we as a Design Department have to take our time and sit together to find a way to make things work for very different stakeholders.

“I was working in huge corporations before, where you’re hired for a job and you do exactly what the job description says. But the nice part here is that you can extend your scope and make it the job you really want it to be. That’s the most exciting part about Taxfix, you have that freedom. Nobody will tell you, ‘this is how you need to do your job.’ You can go in, see where the problems are, make decisions on how to fix them, and then build solutions.”

Interested in joining our Design Team? Check out our open positions here.