Guiding small businesses to automate tax filing
Disclaimer
This is a passion project driven by curiosity and my love for FinTech, I am in no way associated with Stripe Tax. But I always believe design can help improve and unify experiences, hence this is a live document where I am documenting my journey of learning FinTech through a small case study. :)
🧑🏼🎨 My Role
As it was a passion project, I owned the journey from beginning to the end. During the process I wore the hat of a researcher at the beginning, as well as an entrepreneur to understand the needs of a business owner, towards the later stages, I wore the designer hat to began crafting the most optimised experiences.
🧐 But why this one?
FinTech as an industry always made me curious about it's challenges & complexity, and while I heard from my peers about how complex it can be as an industry, I wanted to tinker with it as a designer, not for a final UI ( that's definately the deliverable ), but I wanted to understand how can I begin to solve for it's relevant edge cases
🧐 How did I get started?
I began my understanding by reading about the challenge or tax compliance from a business perspective and from my talks with my peers, I specifically wanted to solve for an edge case which is often overlooked by design
🏋🏽 Finding the right challenge
I began a deep product study of the Tax automation softwares in the industry to see what was being solved and what wasn't
I realised Stripe Tax wasn't currently solving for filing taxes on behalf of the users (business owners) and they were redirected to three different tools with which they had partnered.
While it might have been a strategic company decision, as a user, I experienced three journeys which were very unique from one another in terms of design
🔎 Asking questions to uncover needs
Due to the new domain, I made it a point to start with these set of questions to understand the problem from a business owner perspective.
1. What is the type of business that you operate?
2. What is your business size?
How do you currently handle sales tax compliance and reporting?
What challenges do you face in managing sales tax manually?
Are there specific tax jurisdictions or regions that are more challenging for you to manage?
What features or functionalities would you consider essential in a user-friendly tax automation solution?
How do you envision your business growing, and how should
a tax automation tool support that growth?
Have you considered implementing tax automation tools in the past?
🏋🏽 Understanding a tax payer's As - is journey
My research led me to understand a tax payer's current journey through reading in-depth documentations and playing around with the solutions
A mindmap of interconnected Stripe Tax user experience for the US, EU, and APAC regions
