Design a new taxes management suite

About the Project

Help Tax Analyst to make educated decisions on which fiscal documents the company can take credit from PIS/COFINS, avoiding legal penalties by the government.

Challenges

• Customers complained that as they have a large number of documents to review, some credit were left out due to the risk of legal penalties;

• Product team was new to the business domain and the User-Centered approach.

Team structure

• UX designer and sprint facilitator - me

• UX Writer, PM, PO, 3 developers

Process

To leverage the knowledge of the team regarding the business domain, I facilitated the creation of a CSD (Certainties, Suppositions, and Doubts) matrix that sparked research questions.

This matrix helped us to create our research strategy:

• structured user interviews (remotely) and shadowing user (Tax Analyst) on their daily work conducted by me;

• benchmark research conducted by the team;

• legal research conducted by Product Manager.

I called this discovery phase "Day 0", as it was executed previously to the 5 days Design Sprint process.

Research Insights

• Integration with ERP is a must-have - in the shadowing sessions, I was able to see the user scrambling in spreadsheets and macros;

• Custom defined filters would be awesome - grant the user the possibility to filter only relevant documents;

• Grouping documents would make classification easier - classifying documents one by one is not a option as there are too many;

• Legacy software users demand special attention - if a disruptive solution is offered, users may not adhere.

After research findings were consolidated by the team, I facilitated one Design Sprint that:

• Helped the team on mapping user journey and choosing the target area to work on;

• Led me to create interactive prototypes that evolved after 4 rounds of user testing.

Solution

Following SAP Fiori (SAP's Design System) guidelines, a suite of three webs apps was conceived where users can:

• Please notice that the video/images above are from Axure RP built high-fidelity prototypes: https://ijjrg0.axshare.com

1. Configure filters to specify integration criteria:

   
   

   
   

2. Create Credit Control from imported documents:

3. Post tax data to Financials:

Business Impact

After implementation, one single customer saved 4 million dollars in taxes for documents that wasn’t being credited before.

This was due to the legal research, we were able to come up with the right interpretation of the law.

Since the suite was integrated with the ERP, the documents were automatically imported/classified.

Project Retrospective

💗 What we did well:

• Customers love to be heard;

• “Day 0” helped everybody to be on the same page regarding the business domain;

• Well-executed research and early validation may ferociously prevent waste.

✅ What could be improved:

• A team lacking experience on Design process will need special attention while explaining the goal of each activity;

• Target for the design sprint should be well measured to come up with testable prototypes for the last day.

Collaboration & implementation strategy

Tech stack integration with Design

Award

This project won an award on the Ecosystem category from SAP Labs Latin America, for work towards long-term success and satisfaction of customers and partners.