Quicko - Simplifying Taxing

A brief Overview

WHAT IS QUICKO?

Quicko is a fin-tech platform focused on taxes for individuals and small businesses. From the beginning, the focus has been on DIY products and to motivate users to stay tax compliant with its four major products for Direct & Indirect taxes and a tax planning product for investors.

CONTEXT

Initially, there was no Tax Planning product when I joined Quicko, it was just the part of the user journey which brought users from the broker platform to our web app. We did a redesign of the Tax Filling app in 2019 which was a major update in terms of UX and UI and we filed more than 10K returns and served more than 50K customers with that app. Meanwhile gradually that user journey evolved and became the whole product in itself and where users could visualize their P&L from multiple brokers, plan their advance tax, Invest in MF, and a bunch of other things.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

We had a stable version of both the apps (Tax Filing & Tax Planning) and we were gradually adding details to both the apps. We then realized that because both apps were thought of as individual app there were duplicate components such as profiles, preferences, etc. plus there were different business model though Tax Filing and Tax Planning both falls under the category of Direct Tax. It was not very obvious for us but the user experience was broken because of this duplicacy and complicated navigation between the two products.

This is what we felt

“Experienced pilots may consider the controls of a cockpit as 'easy'—after all, most of the buttons are within reach. But for everyone else, it's a complicated mess.”

Just to give you idea, here are the snapshots of both the products before this project

Tax Filing App

Tax Planning App

SOLUTION

To streamline the user experience of two products we came up with a taxpayer dashboard that takes care of profile level data and preferences. We also streamlined the business model which was spread across two products and made it subscription-based instead of a one-time payment thing. We fixed the navigability with a common menu and also improved the discoverability by redesigning the menu of quicko.com.

DESIGN OUTCOMES

Tax Filing app 2020 was designed in a full-screen layout with a side nav attached to the left side, whereas the tax planning app has a center layout contained in 1080px. We were facing issues with the tax filing app because of the full-screen layout so w we facelifted the app and did the center layout which helped us gain proper information density.

Tax Filing Home

We designed a home page for tax filing app to set a proper context becuase now user easily navigate between two apps.

Context Shifitng

Context-shifting is the process of switching from one 'thing' to another. The role of UX is to lower the cognitive load of that transition.

The home page is a very essential touchpoint for a user so to set a proper context was necessary, we designed a layout with contextual cards which helps the user complete their profile, can navigate to their current return, access previous years returns and documents. Cards will reflect the current status of the tax return.

Because Tax filing and Tax Planning were designed as individual app there were few design discrepancies so we streamlined the UI patterns and navigation patterns in both apps to give a consistent experience to the user.

Taxpayer dashboard

New Design Language

New Vs Old Regime

The government introduced two tax regimes, the old tax regime which has slab rates, and the new tax regime which has flat tax rates.

Decisions

It matters how a user feels about a decision, not just the outcome of that decision. These could be the signature moments of the app.

Users can decide which tax regime to choose while filing the tax return, we wanted to simplify as much as possible for users because this was new and they were confused as hell. So we came up with a simple table that compares the metrics of their income over the two regimes to show a clear picture.

We also add a contextual card with a visual which clearly communicates the outcome of the decision and gives confidence in whatever regime they are choosing.

diving Deeper in the process

PROCESS OVERVIEW

SECONDARY RESEARCH

We did a quantitative analysis with the help of “Full Story” to understand the drop-off rate at different stages, we looked at hundreds of sessions to understand the pain points of the users. We had a one-time payment model when users file their returns and we wanted to do a subscription model by providing year-round services to increase the LTV of users. The major objective of secondary research was to understand the following things

Optimize the journey from tax planning to tax filling app.
Find out points where users were dropping off the most once they are in the tax filing app.

Where can we plug in our expert meet cards to help users file their taxes
How can we increase the number of touch points with the users.

INSIGHTS

As I had worked on both the products and quicko.com website I had a idea of designs at a macro level as well, by looking at user session we were able to derive the following things.

Architechture

It was ambiguous as some of the functionalities like profile were present in both the products and it was creating confusion.

navigation

There was no direct navigation between both the products as the tax planning product was just used as a funnel.

context

Users were getting confused between the current FY and AY so it was not very well communicated

duplicacy

Because of ambiguous architecture, there are few duplicities in the functionalities of the products.

discoverability

There was no direct CTA to tax planning app from quicko.com website.

touch points

Tax filing product is used once a year & with tax planning products we wanted to increase touchpoints and LTV of users throughout the year.

business model

As we combined both products we moved from a one-time payment model to a subscription-based model.

Monitization

We introduced an expert review session for Tax returns to monetize the tax filling product apart from the subscription model

Product Architecture

To solve the problem of duplicity and ambiguous product architecture we decided to design the Taxpayer dashboard that will take care of taxpayer master data such as personal details, contact details & Bank details. Along with taxpayer master data, we moved plan, billing, and expert meet functionality to the taxpayer dashboard. This helped us streamline our business model as well.

Before

After

Ideation & Iterations

sTARTING WITH MENU

This was the toughest part of this project, We struggled a lot designing the top bar menu and the side navigation for the tax filing app and taxpayer dashboard. We wanted to remove the ambiguous components and have a distinct app without any overlapping

TAX FILING APP MENU

Before

We wanted to create seamless experience of switching between the products and improve the navigability of the entire app at the same time we also did not want customers to loose the context between tax planning which is for current financial year and tax filing which for previous financial year.

After

TAX PLANNING APP MENU

Before we changed the architecture of the product tax planner app had this menu and Tax filing tab was just a mediator page that provided the summary of current ITR and take them to the tax filing app.

Before

We did a double-decker top navigation which has the same tabs as the tax filing app in the top and the bottom part has the internal navigation items which take you to the respective tabs of the tax planner app.

After

Changing the UI structure of tax filling app

Before

Our layout was divided into two regions, permanent side nav & content area. So the whole thing used to occupy 70% area on the screen from the left. In the content area, we had a card size of the width of 720 px.

The problem with this layout was it looked were sparse on the big screen as there was a lot of unused space on the right.

We also went from material design to flat design.

After

We observed a few online platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter and how they were achieving the right amount of information density because that was the core problem with our out UI structure

So we moved from left-aligned layout to center-aligned layout with a UI region of 1080px

ACTUAL SCREENS

Redesigning the side nav for tax filing app

From the user feedback and quantitive analysis, we got to know that navigation between different incomes was not too obvious for users so we designed the expandable side nav which has all the incomes listed. This helped us scale our design to new entities as well.

Old Menu

Hover State

Selected State

Extended State

rethinking quicko.com menu

Old Menu

As we were focusing on improving navigation and discoverability of products we also redesigned the quicko.com menu as a part of this project. We categorized our menu into two categories "For Individuals" & " For Businesses". This helped us better communicate our products and improved the discoverability of tax planning products.

New Menu

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