TurboTax Peer to Peer

Connecting customers to their personal contacts in order to increase confidence and solve their problems within TurboTax.

About the project

With this project we were looking to solve a core customer problem for low confidence tax filers. Primarily first time and low confidence filers will reach out to a friend or family member for help before going to one of our support channels. We hypothesized that we could use the same technology that powers TurboTax's Smartlook video calling to connect customers with their preferred friend or family member.

My role

I was the lead product designer for this initive. I collaborated with a team of about 6 developers,
1 researcher, 1 content designer, and a product manager throughout the project.

Research Approach

Paper

Rapid iteration
"Internal" customers
Problem framing

Prototype

Rapid iteration
Customer & helper
User validation

Product

Optimizing funnel
Customers clicking CTA
User feedback

Following our first round of customer interviews, we created this frame work out of what we heard to help guide us going forward. We looked for patterns where customers fell on the spectrum to help us make decisions about how the experience should work.

We spent a couple of weeks as a team working on an MVP experience we could test in product. We were able to use live traffic during a period of tax season with smaller traffic numbers to determine viability of the product. We tested the experience with about 1% of total traffic amounting in about 64,000 customers seeing it.

Our analytics partners were able to share data with us weekly, so we could iterate and make small enhancements to optimize the funnel of the experience. Our main challenge was capturing awareness of customers, so we spent a lot of energy working on the front door for the experiment.

There were two experiences we had to design for, one for the customer, and one for their helper. The above flow is a high level look at the happy path for both of those experiences.

The data doesn't lie

64,000

Customer impressions

Screens Shared
‍

Distilling the findings

After sending out over 300 customer surveys we were able to identify approximately 30 people that fit into our core personas. We were able to talk to 18 on the phone and get their feedback. Here are the key takeaways from the experiment:

The location wasn’t right. Customers thought they were connecting with a turbotax expert
A collaboration platform would better serve our customers
Synchronous sharing doesn’t realistically fit into our customers workflow

So why put a failure in my portfolio?

Let’s be honest, most experiments fail. I think it’s important to show how a project is approached and what you do with the learnings. In the case of this particular project, the learnings we gained on how our customers want to collaborate were applied to our early TurboTax Live experiences.