Canada Revenue Agency

All Canadians & newcomers have to file their taxes. Unfortunately, the CRA’s website makes it a difficult task because of the poor UI design. There is an overwhelming amount of information resulting in difficult navigation through the site.

To improve user flow and  users’ experience, and make it easier for newcomers to file  personal taxes.

As we were starting out we needed to make sure that we understood the scope of the project, as such a white paper research provided us with all the essential information to make educated decisions in regards to our designs. We learnt that just a few short years ago,  technology has changed the bookkeeping and accounting services, promoting their most appealing service - one-stop tax filing^.(1)Two of us team members had faced this issue personally. Hence, tax clinics have gained a massive popularity over the CRA services. Indeed, a one-stop e-filing has become a number one choice for Canadians and newcomers, which prompted us to redesign the web-page accordingly.
(1) -source: cpethink.com

How do you currently file your taxes?      
Why do you use the CRA website?    
Are you able to look for personal income tax forms easily on the website?      
If you were to file your taxes through the CRA website, how would you go about doing it?

To answer the research questions, I invite you to see our usability notes

Keep the research questions in mind while I  guide you through the ideation process.

1 attempt to complete 2 tasks: Sign in & Download personal income tax forms Locate the click to action buttons  in under 5 sec.                    
Successfully file personal income taxes in under 3 mins.              

As we were generating design ideas for the new CRA webpage, we kept in mind the needs of our proto-persona - an immigrant from the USA, who as a newcomer is not familiar with the Canadian tax-filing system. Meet our proto-persona: Amanda Smith!

As an immigrant, Amanda wants to learn what personal income tax forms she needs to file.                
She then needs to sign in to her CRA account.                  
Finally she needs to select personal income tax forms.      

Keep the research questions in mind while I  guide you through the ideation process.

As mentioned above, a one-stop e-filing is a simply more attractive solution for many taxpayers, particularly immigrants.The white paper research (see above) prompted us to ask the following question:
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Why is CRA underperforming if compared with tax clinics?
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As we implemented UI design analysis to focus on the user goals, and the tasks they perform to achieve their goals, we learnt that our proto-persona has to take 8 steps to learn how to file personal income taxes on CRA
             

Step 1
Go to canada.ca and click on - Income Tax              
Step 2
Click on - Personal income tax              
Step 3
Click on -  Who should file a tax return    
Step 4
Click on - Newcomers to Canada
Step 5
Click on - Which income tax package should you use?
Step 6
Click on income tax package
Step 7
Click on - Ontario
Step 8
Select the form you need                

We then asked ourselves how we could improve the user journey, and as we were putting a mood board together for lo-fi design ideas we focused on the   style guide and the heuristic analysis of the CRA webpage to identify our  users’ most frequent pain points. Why were the mood board, style guide and heuristic analysis done simultaneously? Considering the time constraint, we felt that we could meet the deadlines better if we paired up in smaller teams.

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We identified 6 principal pain points for the user while conducting the evaluation. E.g.: content organisation (see below). For more information, please click here.    As we were moving on with our project, we wanted to focus on optimising the CRA website design & navigation  with the help of  intuitive information architecture.  Bad information architecture is something we needed to avoid at all costs. As it confuses and annoys the user, making them leave the page which then causes a significant decrease of conversions. In order to make CRA information architecture intuitive and user-friendly we had to take a look at it from the user’s point of view. We felt that the best way to do that would be through  a card sorting method .For more information please click on the hyperlink.

As somebody who loves staying in the francophone part of Canada, I wanted to learn the difference between filing taxes in Quebec and Ontario. Surprisingly,  I discovered that quebec.ca has a minimalist homepage layout with one-stop solutions and  easy-to-spot accessibility features. Hence, my competitor analysis reinforced my desire to move to Quebec! As we were conducting  usability testing, our participants voiced the need to have  a search bar with filters to narrow down their search scope and most importantly to make CRA meet  all of the requirements of policies that reference The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Additionally, we firmly believe in  in-depth usability testing, as  thorough testing guarantees quality results. As such I encourage you to  click on the following hyperlinks to see our process.
User Testing ResultsRedesign CRA Research Plan2X2 MatrixColour Accessibility AssessmentCompetitor AnalysisRecorded User Tests                            

1) The CRA website uses error codes whenever issues occur, which have little meaning to users.              
2) The website doesn’t take the user  to the CRA homepage when clicking on the logo.              
3) The CRA website layout is very content-dense + bad organisation. This makes it difficult to remember where certain things are.        
4) The CRA website does not offer any option to bookmark the page nor create shortcuts    
5) CRA informs users of errors via error messages. This is not helpful. They should state a problem and provide a solution.
6) CRA provides  live chat features in case the user has a problem with the website. However the website does not have a help page and FAQ.        

As part of the design process, we ventured into understanding the web content accessibility guidelines, as our target users may have special needs. Subsequently, we understood that due to the time constraint we could meet only two requirements: colour blind colour palette, speech-to-text chatbot.

After usability testing, we quickly realised that our paper sketches needed some improvement. Our participants reported low satisfaction and multi-level concerns   with a horizontal accordion.  This feedback prompted us to switch to a vertical accordion. Our low fidelity wireframes were updated accordingly.
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Finally, It begs a question: How did the stages above improve our wireframes?  This question was essential to understand the effectiveness of our design process. Thankfully, our participants were very insightful about their experiences when it comes to filing taxes. Thus, we included their requests in our MVP matrix and created a list of Behavioural UX KPIs.
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To prove the effectiveness of our KPIs I invite you to go through the redesigned screens.

1 attempt to complete 2 tasks: Sign in & Download  personal income tax forms          
Locate the click to action buttons  in under 5 seconds          
Successfully file personal income taxes in under 3 minutes                                              

1 attempt to complete 2 tasks: Sign in & Download personal income tax forms
Locate the click to action buttons  in under 5 sec.                    
Successfully file personal income taxes in under 3 min.              

Lastly, we conducted our final usability testing  using Usabilityhub. Our participants reported high satisfaction with the final product and requested an Android prototype.
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Hi-Fi Mobile and Desktop prototypes designed using the colour blind safe palette      
A/B testing –testing out two different landing pages     

 We had no time left to develop  a speech–to-text chatbot in Adobe XD      

We would have definitely incorporated the comments from above to create an even better experience.  Furthermore, we would want to track metrics such as income tax and log in clicks. Other ways to measure success include: 
More usability testing: at which points are the users leaving      
More user feedback: what are users’ behaviours  and opinions?      
Traffic analysis: how are the users interacting with the new CRA layout?      
A/B testing: is our chosen UI design pattern  effective in increasing users’ likelihood to complete their goals successfully?    
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The most important lesson was to introduce the participants early on. Thankfully, we managed to recruit 7 participants from different backgrounds.    Additionally,  time management  played a paramount role in our design process. We relied on Asana to track our progress, however we failed at developing a speech-to-text chatbot