Application / Tax / Accounting
ERC Digital Tax Credit Application Process for Small Businesses
Overview
My Role: Product Designer-UIUX
Team: Eva Kuhnert (Product Owner), Cameron Pulcifer (Lead Dev), Dennis Pavlyuk (front-end), Tony Balogh (Systems Engineer), Josh Brown (COO), Debbie Violette (Director)
Duration: 3 months and 3 sprints after launch
Tools: Figma, Azure DevOps, ProductBoard, Powerpoint, Material Design, Azure B2C for customer login
Small business owners are not taking advantage of Employee Retention Credit
There is huge government funding set aside for Employee Retention Credit, or ERC, for businesses that kept their employees hired during the recent Covid-19 pandemic. However, most CPAs and accountants neglect small businesses since filing for ERC involves a lot of tedious paperwork and the earning is not as high as some of their other clients’ projects. As a result, most small business owners are either unaware of ERC or try to file for it themselves and fail. My team at ERC Digital identified this gap as an opportunity and proposed to solve the problem by simplifying the application process, identifying key questions, and automating the process as much as possible.
Time is of the essence
Since ERC is a broadly based refundable tax credit designed to encourage employers to keep employees on their payroll during the pandemic, it has a short shelf life. This means that the team had to move quickly and adapt and pivot as needed. In order to align the team and assist with quick decision-making, I created greyscale lo-fi wireframes as the new discovery unfolded. Having a visual guide to what the team is discussing helped facilitate effective communication and decision-making process, and ended up saving a lot of time by minimizing miscommunication. The team was able to identify areas to improve faster, and in every meeting, participants were aligned on what product feature the team was discussing.
And as most designers learn as they accrue more experiences, they spend a lot of time doing work other than the actual designing. This includes a lot of reading, listening, speaking to peers, and pitching your ideas to stakeholders. For this project, there were a lot of reading materials surrounding the work from initial pitch, and market research, to business requirements, analysis, and more. After onboarding and reviewing all existing documents in the first week, and asking a lot of questions, the wireframes below are what I created by the end of week 2!
See the image carousel below for the wireframes I created by the end of week 2 after joining the team.
You can also check out the Sandbox page in my Figma file directly at this link.
What the business needs:
The primary goal of ERC Digital is to generate revenue by targeting a niche market of small business owners who are often neglected by tax preparers.
Due to the short shelf life of the ERC tax credit program, the product needs to be launched quickly and efficiently using agile methodology to allow for quick pivots and adaptations.
The product must be developed in a way that prioritizes security and ensures the collection and storage of sensitive tax information is done in a clear and secure manner.
ERC Digital must have a clear go-to-market plan that generates a profit and attracts potential investors.
What the user needs:
Small business owners who have less than 50 employees are the target users of ERC Digital.
Most tax service providers neglect this user group because of the smaller earnings, leaving many small business owners missing out on millions of dollars in tax credit.
ERC Digital aims to streamline the application process and simplify eligibility checks, allowing small business owners to easily access the funds they are entitled to.
The product must be designed in a way that is user-friendly and easy to understand, taking into account the fact that many small business owners may not be familiar with the tax credit process.
Design Process
When I first joined the team, there was an existing marketing/branding website that had certain design patterns I identified early. They had already employed a black/dark theme with white text against black, and a grey area that divides the background white space (See image below). Even though the application was technically a stand-alone product, it is not important to the user. In fact, it helps the user to understand where they are and what they are doing when there is a seamless design consistency.
As a result I suggested an ERC application to follow the broader design patterns aforementioned in the marketing site and have a two-colored background with a floating white paper. This image below was the very first proposal. The drop shadow around white paper was later removed to imitate the flat design patterns of the marketing site. Initially, we were using Material UI design components to speed up the development process and drop shadow was incorporated with the components, and therefore I suggested that we keep the drop shadow for the early iterations.
Also note that the elements in the navigation bar and content are all aligned using the same container. This was a strategic design decision to reduce and speed up development time.
Style guide and working closely with the Engineering team
Another way I helped save development time was coming up with a comprehensive design style guide to syncronize all design and development effort. By providing the style guide early, the dev team was able to start their development effort early without waiting for the design to be correctly reflected across every single screen. This was also made possible becuase of daily sync meetings with engineering team and keeping close communication loop.
These are informal and were very quickly created. But the key components that are repeated often throughout the application were identified early and were then organized, turned into a component to increase design velocity.
Content review
Once we laid down the foundation and the engineering team was able to ship product features along with the design, the next step was reviewing the content to make sure they are user-friendly and all important legal information was covered. I worked very closely with the legal team, PM, and conducted a few quick rounds of user testing with business owners to make sure the language is not too complicated, the help section answers any questions that may come up, and to ensure the wording is legally sound.
Main areas of focus for content review
Page heading
They had to be a reasonable length and clear enough so the user understands immediately the purpose of each page
Stepper
Stepper turned out to be an unexpected headache as we had to be very strategic about page breakdowns, amount of content per page, heading length, and other technical limitations that came with the native component used for this.
Wording around questions
The questions had to be written legally precisely but also simply and to the point to make sure we collect accurate data. This way the processors do not have to chase after each applicant to correct information.
Help text
Needless to say, help text needed multiple revisions to ensure that the users were able to read and understand the requirements and complete the entire application with little to no in-person help. Part of the year’s OKR was to automate 80% of the application process.
Any consent or signature collection (ex. Terms of Use and Service, Acknowledgements, and TaxStatus Consent)
The team’s top priority throughout this product development cycle as well as for BrightFi’s main banking product was security and credibility. And I welcomed this challenge with open arms! The mission was to break down consent forms that can be intimidating into digestible formats so the users know with full confidence what they are consenting to, why we need the information, and how their information is stored.
These are the pages that required additional attention during content review. The first two pages passed usability tests with all of the participants understanding the entire page content. However, TaxStatus Consent page needed some more revisions. This revision was a work in progress and some of the updates cannot be shared publicly due to NDA.*
*Please note the entire company’s workforce was let go when the company closed its doors due to outside economic factors combined with the recent SVB incident. There are many works that were done but never shipped that I cannot publicly share. The items that are shared in the portfolio are features that were already shipped and launched.
Some features in the backlog
There are a few features in the backlog that never shipped and therefore cannot be shared here:
Dashboard for two user groups:
Small Business Owners filing individual application for their business
Tax Preparers handling multiple applications at a time. These people typically managed 1-20 applications simultaneously and we supported over 30,000 users.
Concierge service mode for applications
Outcomes
Designed over 22 individual pages for the ERC application flow each complete with interactive components, considering technical limitations and requirements from dev team, complete with fully reviewed content, design style guide, reusable component library, design work documentation, introduced design file management system for the first time in the organization.
Designed an eligibility calculator that gives on-the-spot estimation range to encourage users to begin the application process.
Incorporated Azure B2C for the sign-in/sign-up flow
Created dashboard experience for once the user signs up for two different use cases through numerous discovery calls with small business owners and tax firm representatives.
Was able to ship the product from scratch to complete with all its features in under 90 days which helped secure Series B funding and helped directly with company’s cash flow for 4 months.
Independently managed project and sprint items and assisted with product management work up until the launch date, and helped hire a PM to fill that role post-launch
Actively participated in all stakeholder meetings as a design advocate/consultant
Finishing Thoughts
ERC Digital was a “side project” at BrightFi that ended up becoming the main product as this product was funneling cash into the company which ended up funding the rest of the banking products for four months. For me as a product designer, this was a huge learning opportunity as the company’s top talents were poured into this project. I got to work with the industry’s top talents from ex-Googlers and ex-McKinsey, to more junior staff members that eventually stepped up and took on more senior roles with incredible grit and growth. I also wore many hats as a product designer, product manager, and a UX researcher to name a few. It was all around a very satisfying, impressive run with a team of dedicated individuals who were all working towards the same goal: to create a product that’s user friendly, and brings in revenue, with a quick go-to-market plan based on thorough research and execution.
It is not an exaggeration to say this was my first true experience where developer and designer communication happened early and often throughout the development cycle of the product where the design was executed down to every pixel by the development team. This was made only possible by open communication where everyone respected each other’s expertise, sharing of ideas happened simultaneously, and multi-directionally. Empathy was a core value practiced by individuals at every level of the organization, and I am truly grateful to have been a part of this amazing team.
It was sad to hear that the company could no longer keep its doors open as many outside factors interfered with the operation, just in time with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank a week prior to the entire workforce being let go. I was devastated not only because of the loss of my job but because of the team members I had to part ways with. We were about to start implementing some metrics in place to measure our success in key areas, define what success means to us as a product team, and to each individual, and I still wish we could see this project through. Regardless, the learnings, the experience, and the friendship I gained from this work are priceless and I will take those to heart with me wherever I end up in my next career move. Until next time, cheers!