Calculate sales and use tax
Product adoption: Tax determination products that help to calculate taxes and manage exemptions.
MY ROLE
Senior UX Designer
TIMELINE
6 months | 2023
TEAMMATES
2 Product owners
8 Developers
Impact
Increased migrations
200%
Feature adoption
The problem
The company’s tax determination product suite lacked clarity in value and differentiation. With overlapping functionality across multiple offerings, clients struggled to identify which product best fit their specific needs.
This ongoing project aimed to clarify Sovos’s tax determination offerings. Key goals included further defining and enhancing the exemption manager product, while also encouraging users of the basic tax calculator product to upgrade. These efforts contributed to a broader initiative to redefine and unify the overall tax determination experience.
Research
Pendo analytics
3
Services interviews
3
Customer interviews
5
Facilitated workshops
Planning the roadmap
As a result of the research and cross team collaboration, we were able to put together a roadmap that sharpened the vision for the exemption manager product while guiding improvements toward a smoother experience.
The solution
The team followed the defined roadmap to modernize the product and address gaps in functionality. Then we moved forward with a roadmap influenced by my research. I created a future vision for the product to align the team on what we were working towards. Given that the research revealed significant customer frustrations with the email feature, redesigning it became our top priority.
Exemption manager vision
To align the team around a cohesive direction, I created a future vision for the exemption management product.
Key insights
A top priority was enabling users to quickly identify exemptions requiring attention and take action.
Through research, I uncovered a fundamental mismatch in how the system defined certificates and exemptions. The product defined a certificate as a PDF and an exemption as a PDF with associated metadata. However, users saw them as one and the same — a single exemption whose status simply changed from “ready to process” to “active.”
Additionally, I discovered a critical assumption in the original design: it was built around the idea that managing your customer list was the primary task. In reality, users were most often trying to manage exemptions. I found that users spent most of their time managing their customers because the system did not allow for duplicate customers or exemptions — not because it was their primary task.
Email redesign
While clients were initially excited about the email campaign feature during the sales process, many abandoned the feature post-onboarding due to emails resembling phishing attempts. To rebuild trust and drive adoption, I redesigned both the visual design and workflow.
We were able to track the usage in Pendo and found that the redesign resulted in a 200% increase in feature adoption.
Kelsey Pintens
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