Overview​
Design a modernized tax filing and payment system intended to improve upon the original Sales & Use Tax System (SUTS) platform. It aims to streamline how businesses file and remit sales and use taxes to multiple Colorado home-rule jurisdictions via a single online portal.
Business and Design Objectives
Improve compliance, reduce administrative burden, and enhance the user experience for businesses filing sales and use taxes across Colorado’s complex tax landscape.
Project Involvement
As the hands on UX Design Leader, I spearheaded the UX research & design and strategic leadership by actively conducting customer interviews, synthesizing research findings, distilling user research data into actionable design tasks, and initiating journeymaps, mockups, as well as prototypes while facilitating design workshops.
Tools
Pendo, Figma, Jira, Confluence, Userbit, Surveymonkey
Challenges & Opportunities
Create an enhanced version of the Sales & Use Tax platform, reflecting visualized and organized filing responsibilities across jurisdictions without overwhelming users.
Persona Creation
Identifying the key users from the off was very helpful in understanding their respective roles, tasks,
and user journeys.
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One of 6 personas defined
including Small & Large Businesses, Professional Preparer, Tax Analysts, and
Technology Service Providers (e.g., Avalara and Vertex)

User Interviews and Findings Synthesis
During the discovery phase, I led numerous surveys and user interviews to better understand the problem space, pain points, and inform the design solutions. Working closely with the Coloraado Department of Revenue team, I developed an interview script consisting of open-ended questions, intended to focus on the users' values, motivations, and day to day tasks. Having interviewed 36 participants across the 6 personas, the team and I have surfaced key insights
Key Feedback and Takeaways:
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"SUTS is too hard and clunky"
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"Don't use SUTS – Too hard"
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"Bank info not saved"
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"Excel is familiar"
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"I don't understand XML"
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From Userbit to Figma
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Tagging surveys and customer interviews helped greatly in sythesizing the findings and translating them into actionable design opportunties and tasks
A Much Improved Experience
Given how filing taxes is inherently detail-heavy and repetitive, mitigating tech fatigue and cognitive overload is one of my main design goals. As such, the team and I ensured that we presented UI affordances for exceptions such as error banners, editable fields, and clear audit trails.
Design Consistencies:
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Enhanced UI reflects consistent positioning
of key components ensuring familiarity
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Tiles, cards, meaningful iconography, hi-res imagery and adorners reflect a more modern layout while ensuring accessibility compliance
A highly visible and meaningfully positioned 'step indicator' offers users with better wayfinding during the tax filing process
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An embedded map feature allows tax filers to easily view
Colorado jurisdictions for reference
