For self-employed individuals, understanding when and how much to pay in taxes is very important. QuickBooks Self-Employed solves this problem and this body of work describes an update to the taxes page in order to improve the tax experience.
I worked on the interaction and visual designs for this update.
The current taxes screen provides high level numbers about annual income, profit, etc. and details about each Schedule C category. This page needed to be transformed to focus more on the federal quarterly taxes that the user owed.
Goals for this design included a simple way to see a user's quarterly tax payments. The current quarter is the most important but past and overdue payments are needed for the user understand their complete tax picture.
For my first step I started by exploring layout redesigns. I wanted to provide a clear way to see the current quarter tax payment as well as the summary of past activity and the overall balance. I also included space of the overall profit, income, etc. The Schedule C info was updated to the the deduction amount and the actual spend amount. This is the same for most tax categories. Any category that were this amounts differed would have a help option to explain why. Deductable meals for example is only 50% of your actual spending.
It became clear that the space used for total profit and income numbers did not make sense and new layouts are designed to allow more space for the tax summary and the Schedule C info.
horizontal and vertical layouts were explored for the tax summary information.
The QuickBooks design system was also considered during this process and this resulted in further layout updates to include a top area for critical information, insights, and actions. Supporting information is shown below.
After several design reviews with the team, I began to feel the Schedule C felt more and more out of place on this page. Around the same time a colleague suggested a timeline style layout to show the quarterly payments. I built off both ideas and came up with a new direction.
Not all users pay estimated taxes on the correct schedule so highlighting the current amount due plus any overdue amount is important.
These various timeline states show how a user could progress and make tax payments throughout the year.
A screenshot showing the final design is below. Current and overdue information are highlighted and supported numbers are shown below. The Schedule C info was moved into a different section of the app.
