HMRC Digital: User-centred design of Business Tax Account.
User research program to support the design of an online self-serve tax portal for 6.5 million UK businesses.
Brief
Support the agile product team with user research to identify key needs of business users and test new features & designs to ensure the UX meets required. government standards
Approach
Develop UX/UR sprint plan to improve UR cadence and quality of design insights. Execute rapid + regular bi-weekly UR cycles. Conduct discoveries, including research with internal users & experts to validate the biggest issues to solve. Deliver insight to a cross-functional team.
Outcome
Hugely improved quality of test participants, prototypes & regular cadence. Increased engagement in UR from the product team & wider business. Evolution from a top-down, business driven product direction to a design & user needs driven process & roadmap. Significant cultural change in terms of approach and decision making.
Rapid prototype testing
Regular & iterative testing of HTML prototypes for new tax account functionality with target business users. To achieve this a completely revamped approach to user recruitment & lab testing set up was recommended and executed.
Outcome: Highly usable and user focused designs created, then validated, finalised & handed over to the dev team on time. High user adoption + enegagement of new features (including online tax payments, account management, adding tax services to account, VAT service improvements, ePAYE service improvements, end of tax year checklist + many others).
Surveys to understand active users
A new survey banner was designed & added to the BTA homescreen. The survey was designed to understand more about BTA users: how they use the account and what they expect from it in the future.
Outcome: The survey collected >3500 responses within a week, providing the most robust and extremely rich data on current user motivations and behaviours. Despite initial scepticism, the team adopted this approach & repeated the process with several similar surveys.
Research with internal support teams
A challenge for the thousands of HMRC customer support agents was keeping up with rapid changes to online tools and being able to see what the customer sees in their online account when they contact HMRC A comprehensive discovery on an Internal View solution was carried out, comprising of dozens of interviews with agents across numerous business support lines & tax regimes.
Outcome: A clear direction on the most important user needs & most promising technical solution delivered to senior decision makers.. A set of personas to communicate the needs of support teams within the digital product space.
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