TurboTax

Data-in System

Role

Design Lead

Timeframe

2024-2025

Team

4 Designers

Background & goal

Building a scalable system to enable a 'Done for You' tax experience

Building a scalable system to enable a 'Done for You' tax experience

Taxes are a lot of work even with a product as powerful and user friendly as TurboTax. To address this reality and drive new growth for TurboTax, our organization declared a vision for a ‘Done for You’ tax experience with zero work for the customer.



Acquiring as much tax data as possible for each customer's return was a vital piece of the strategy.

Taxes are a lot of work even with a product as powerful and user friendly as TurboTax. To address this reality and drive new growth for TurboTax, our organization declared a vision for a ‘Done for You’ tax experience with zero work for the customer.



Acquiring as much tax data as possible for each customer's return was a vital piece of the strategy.

Customer problems

Inconsistent data-in experiences and quality eroded trust and caused abandonment

Inconsistent data-in experiences and quality eroded trust and caused abandonment

Data-in features were offered very inconsistently E2E
Methods were unsupported in various sections, many form types weren't supported, and the UI was different all over our products.

Error rates and data extraction accuracy were too low
Data-in features were built on top of various legacy back-end capabilities and errors quickly eroded trust

Gathering tax docs and finding where to enter them was a chore
Customers had to track down all of their docs at tax time which were often spread out across physical and digital storage locations

Solution

A high quality AI powered data-in system at scale across the ecosystem.

A high quality AI powered data-in system at scale across the ecosystem.

Our 'Data-in' team established 3 strategic pillars to bring the Done For You vision to life:

Our 'Data-in' team established 3 strategic pillars to bring the Done For You vision to life:

1

Guided Data-in
A system of capabilities like bulk doc upload, financial account import, and mobile photo capture that would extract and apply tax doc data with no manual typing required. 





2

Automatic Data-in
‘No action required’ capabilities that would leverage Intuit ecosystem and pre-established financial account data connections to automatically import tax docs and data.





3

AI Powered Review and Inference


By leveraging Al we would pre-fill the doc data, infer any missing information, and guide users through a personalized review process.

Approach

1 Auditing the scope of touchpoints

First, we set out to map the range of contexts that our system needed to succeed in. This helped us understand the more specific customer problems that existed in those spaces and tailor our design to meet those needs. Doing this from the start also helped us anticipate which components of the system needed to be flexible and which could remain fixed to enforce end-to-end consistency.

2 Creating the design frameworks

Next we had to design the frameworks for our data-in flows. Below is a simplified look at the core frameworks for Guided and Automatic Data-in.

Outcome

Features leveraging our Data-in System exceeded business expectations

Below are just a few highlights of the many features that leveraged our frameworks. Because Data-in was a 'hybrid platform team', we not only designed and built the capabilities but we also implemented them in product in many cases.

TurboTax DIY

Partner app jumpstart

+$114m

Incr. Revenue

+5%

Start to complete

TurboTax DIY

Auto-import + Personal info AI Review

Auto-import + Personal info
AI Review

+$25.6m

Incr. Revenue

-15%

Abandonment

TurboTax DIY

Self employed AI Expenses

+$1.8m

Incr. Revenue

+1%

Start to Complete

TurboTax Expert Full Service

Doc Checklist

+3%

Start to Complete

+2.5%

Expert time savings