Intuit

Role → Product Designer

Timeline → Mar 2020–Nov 2021

Team → TurboTax

Starting my design career as a TurboTax designer

Context

The TurboTax Core design team consisted of around 12 designers, each owning a different space within the expansive TurboTax product.

I was in charge of the Horizontals team, which entailed non-core tax prep products such as onboarding, check-out, and various e-Comm related features.

01

Project Intro

Project / Team / Role

Price Preview / Commerce Team / Lead Designer

Context

Put simply - Price Preview is an in-product "cart" for TurboTax customers to refer to throughout tax-prep.

Timeline

6 months (2nd half of 2021, ahead of 2022 tax season).

At a high-level, this project had three phases to it:

  1. Visioning and designing the ideal state.

  2. Scoping it back and testing an in-season MVP.

  3. Refining and launching full-scale for the following tax season.

02

The Problem

The primary problem is that customers are often blindsided by TurboTax pricing by the time they get to the end of tax-prep.

This is exasperated by “free, free, free” and “start for free” marketing material, as well as the inability to see pricing in product.

We call this Price Transparency (or lack thereof).

So… how might we build and regain customer trust by increasing price transparency throughout the tax prep experience?

03

Exploration

Starting with stickies, per usual. I lead multiple brainstorming jams with the x-func team to go broad to narrow on what Price Preview should be.

04

Early Design

Multiple rounds of low-fidelity design. Whipping up an MVP that ladders up to ideal state principles we defined above.

05

Review & Refine

Many, many crits and reviews with leadership, designers, and x-func partners. Tons of iteration off of the great feedback received.

Outcomes and Learnings

The final version of Price Preview was handed off to the development team right before I departed from Intuit. Thus, I wasn’t able to see how it would perform the following tax season. That said, I’ve never been more excited to do my taxes online. Seeing a product I built out in the wild was a great feeling!

Results from the MVP launched late the prior tax season though were positive and exactly what we were looking for. Price Transparency did go up, as well as overall conversion. There were some tradeoffs in regards to other tracking qualitative metrics, but the consensus was that Price Preview was a success.