Intuit: Turbotax Business (10/06 – 8/07)
Designed interaction for two of four teams assigned to TurboTax® Business 2007. While conducting several usability studies, I helped the team of tax experts improve form selection, expenses, and other areas particularly confusing or troublesome for users. One thing to note here, the TurboTax Business product is built upon Intuit’s professional product. It is a fairly complete solution, but still contains quite a bit of content originally written for accountants.
The form selection process was reduced to a single screen. With the help of tax experts and a copyrighter, we improved the layout and reduced confusion between the different options. For instance, a few rare instances require unusual filing practices. Rather than making these possibilities differentiated selections (giving them equal weight to the more common options), we improved the help content and limited the user to simpler options. Although this might create confusion for the odd-ball filer, our studies found the percentage of filers with those conditions to be well below 5% and a majority of them understood their situation and didn’t require help. Usability indicated users not only found the correct form faster, but were much more confident in their selection and the rest of the product.
The single biggest problem small business owners have when filing taxes, assuming their books are accurate, is correctly assigning business expenses. To improve this process, we decided to use a novel way of customizing examples in each expense section to better represent the type of expenses the user is likely to have. For instance, if the user indicates his/her business is a manufacturing plant, expenses commonly associated with manufacturing are displayed in the respective expense sections. It’s not likely a consultant has farming expenses, so we leave them off-screen in the help section and concentrate on travel and office expenses. Usability firmly supported our hypothesis that users are more confident of choices when one or two examples exactly match their needs.
I look forward to picking up a copy of TurboTax Business 2007 when it becomes available to see how everything works for my business.