I was the lead Product Designer on this project, responsible for both the interaction and visual design. I also represented UX in the trifecta.

In addition, I worked with a Researcher to plan and conduct exploratory research, with a Content Designer on messaging needs and IA and also led and conducted usability tests.

We had early indicators from support that merchants were struggling to understand and manage tax obligations.

At the outset of the project we didn't have a clear idea of how we were going to support our merchants. Without pre-existing insights, I partnered with our researcher to understand how merchants dealt with sales tax.

I worked with the Researcher to plan and conduct generative research. Our research revealed that there are five core steps of sales tax management - Awareness, Registration, Collection, Reporting and Remittance and the friction in our merchants journey began at the first step.

Merchants were struggling with the very first step of tax management - Awareness. If they weren't sure where to collect taxes, they weren't able to register for and remit taxes in the right states.

To move forward, we needed to tackle the first step of awareness. Our goal was to make it really simple for merchants to understand if, where, and when they need to register and collect sales tax in a state.

Given the complexity and granularity of tax rules, our challenge was to make sure we were providing enough context to the merchant so they'd feel confident enough to take action, but at the same time not bomboarding them with detailed tax laws and jargon.

I worked closely with the content designer to define the content and messaging needs for our product. The content needs helped inform the visual hierarchy and IA.

During the iteration process, I spent time refining the visual language and creating design patterns that were scalable and could be easily extended to other countries and regions.

I also led a round of usability testing and made improvements based on feedback before we shipped the final version.

We launched the tax liability insights dashboard to over a million merchants in the U.S. in 2021. The feature has received an overwhelmingly positive response from UX leadership at Shopify and from our merchants.

In the first month of launch, over ~150,000 tax registrations were added. We've seen a significant reduction in the gap of outstanding liabilities and our product also has a high double-digit conversion rate.

To learn more about our product, go to Shopify Tax. You can also check out this tweet from Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify, or this article on Business Insider.