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How Multidisciplinary Feedback Loops Improve Our Products
Calling FileYourStateTaxes a team effort is an understatement. Like all our products, our state tax filing tool’s success in its pilot year is a testament to our commitment to iteration. It’s also a perfect way to showcase our experience team, a multidisciplinary collaboration that uses feedback loops to gather insights and make changes to products that improve the client experience at every point.
Code for America’s experience team is composed of four disciplines: Qualitative research, client success, data science, and design. Each discipline brings a unique skill set to better understand and support clients using FileYourStateTaxes:
- Qualitative research generates an understanding of taxpayers through interviews, usability testing, concept testing, and other research methods
- Client success interacts daily with taxpayers by answering questions that come through live chat and email
- Data science tries to quantify the client experience — for example, by measuring where taxpayers drop off of the product or which screens elicit the most questions from taxpayers
- Design takes insights gathered across these disciplines to create an experience that honors taxpayers needs and preferences, reduces confusion, and streamlines their tax filing journey
Why create feedback loops?
Feedback loops are essentially a system of gathering, analyzing, and acting on information. These loops enable us to analyze real-time data, collaborate with our cross-disciplinary team to identify solutions, and make updates to the product. This approach is particularly beneficial for a live product, where clients often seek support as they use it. This allows researchers to analyze conversations where clients are already sharing their experiences rather than requiring clients to participate in additional research studies. Each product’s feedback loop might look different. With FileYourStateTaxes, qualitative research gathered client feedback through various channels, including post-submission surveys, analytics, and questions submitted via our chat feature.
Feedback loops are essentially a system of gathering, analyzing, and acting on information...This approach is particularly beneficial for a live product, where clients often seek support as they use it.
Implementing feedback loops from the beginning
Before the FileYourStateTaxes launch, our design and qualitative research teams used feedback from concept and usability testing to test potentially confusing or challenging tax questions and advocate for plain language modifications.
Some early insights from research with taxpayers helped us define a set of design principles to center in our decision-making moving forward. One of those principles was that language should serve as a friendly, trusted guide throughout the filing journey. This means we want to offer clear, reassuring, verified, and transparent written and visual communication throughout the tool. We aim to offer a consistent set of languages and terms between federal and state filing tools (i.e., If IRS Direct File is available in both English and Spanish, the state filing tool also should be available in both languages).
Our design and qualitative research teams also worked with our in-house tax policy experts to develop eligibility questions and identify tricky tax situations that we tested with clients in moderated research sessions. We also worked closely with bilingual designers at Code for America to transcreate Spanish-language content. After each round of testing, we iterated on the content and flow, integrating client feedback.
Getting feedback that brings the client experience to life
Our client success team has rich information about the client experience from live chats—so when they share common questions or challenges in weekly meetings with our qualitative researchers, our researchers can follow up on that information in more in-depth one-on-one interviews with clients.
Despite our best efforts to help clients understand what came next, they frequently contacted chat support to understand why they could not transfer their data from Direct File to FileYourStateTaxes without an accepted federal return. Qualitative research explored this pain point further in taxpayer interviews, and worked with the design team to improve the content on the data transfer initiation page to elevate this requirement. Thanks to this feedback loop, we made these improvements early in the pilot, resulting in a decrease in this question being asked to client success.
Seeing the broader picture
In-depth client feedback is important, but so are data trends. That’s where our data science team comes in to explore emerging research questions, identify converging insights across data points, and discuss potential product enhancements.
In one example, our data science team highlighted that, often, the last page clients visited before using live chat was a post-submission page, where they could see the status of their return and download a PDF of their submitted return.
To better understand why so many people reached out at this stage, we analyzed the live chat messages that clients submitted on those pages and uncovered they had questions about amending their return, correcting a rejected state return, and paying their taxes or starting a payment plan—mainly questions that pertained to other parts of the tax filing process outside of FIleYourStateTaxes. In response, we created tailored FAQs to help taxpayers navigate the rest of the tax filing process.
Multidisciplinary collaboration guarantees us a more holistic view of the client experience, and sources solutions for product and program improvement that take into account as many forms of feedback as we can at one time.
Putting it all together
Working on a multidisciplinary team to source, analyze, and act on information can take an extraordinary amount of coordination. To make feedback loops work well, here are our top four tips:
- Learn about the client experience from all available data points—surveys, interviews, analytics, chat logs
- Create spaces to make sense of these data points and develop deeper client insights with teams that interact with clients, such as qualitative and quantitative research, client success and design
- Create processes to uplift these emerging insights with cross-functional stakeholders to address any immediate client needs and document others for future improvements
- Be flexible and open to adapting your product as you learn more about the client experience
Feedback loops are a critical part of any process that keeps clients’ needs front and center. At Code for America, we’re dedicated to using tools like this to ensure that we’re making the most out of each and every skill set that we have available to us. Multidisciplinary collaboration—between researchers, designers, product managers, engineers, client support specialists, and policy experts—guarantees us a more holistic view of the client experience, and sources solutions for product and program improvement that take into account as many forms of feedback as we can at one time. A team that has all these skill sets at the table is able to serve people better and provide a more welcoming experience to anyone who uses our products.