Project Hidden
This project is hidden because of IP concerns. Please check out this case study to get a better idea of my work. Or book a time here for an intro to more of my work.
Project
Pallo
An everything tax app for freelancers in USA
Objectives, Limitations
Objectives
- Design a tax app that could serve all categories of freelancers in the US
- Explore how AI would help simplify user journeys
- Design something that was intuitive and easy to navigate. Many tax apps are feature bloated which makes them hard to navigate through.
Limitations
- The co-founders approached me at a very early stage. They knew what they wanted but a lot of things were being figured out on the fly.
Project Overview
Project Overview
I started with Pallo just after they had started raising their first round. The team wanted to create the easiest tax app for freelancers. They had seen the impact of such a product in New Zealand and the UK and wanted to replicate that in the US. I worked with the team to figure out the basic concept of the app and then we dove deep into figuring out the key flows.
Pallo's Value Proposition
The everything tax app for all freelancers in the United States. From web designers to taxi drivers, the app serves as a financial crutch for all of them.
My role
My role was to work alongside the team to take their ideas and turn them into tangible screens that could give us more insight into the UX we wanted to build. We took the concepts from this exercise and weaved them into an app that flowed seamlessly across flows. We also had an important task of making sure our product was AI enabled, the Pallo team was closely following the AI advancements even in early 2021 so we worked with AI before it was cool!
Design Process
The Process
We use a simple 3-step process for all our work.
Big Picture
We wanted to create a product that was simple and worked seamlessly for all freelancer types. Intuit was already offering a pretty popular tax product but it felt like a legacy application. Our focus was sharply on freelancers of all kinds.
Tax is a stressful activity for many freelancers and sole traders. We wanted to design something that supported the freelancer with their finances throughout the year rather than just at the end.
Insights
As a freelancer myself who had trouble with taxing in the past, I knew what my issues were and the problems faced by freelancers.
Freelancers liked transparency. Regular updates and reminders. As well as ease to find and access information.
After doing a deep dive into the competitor's products. We realised that a lot of tax products were very information dense and heavy. Although, all of the information was necessary - it didn't have to be squeezed in to create a busy UI. So, we wanted to focus on an information architecture that was freelancer friendly and that could evolve as per the user's needs.
Design Solution
Given the goal and the insights we decided that there were a few must haves in our solution.
Regular reminders and updates would allow us to take away some of the stress from the whole process.
Clear UI indication of what information is stored where. Separate tabs for things like expenses and tax history.
We had to allow for customization features, ability to maintain multiple bank accounts and have freelancer specific tools to maintain a friendly information architecture.
Our onboarding had to be clearly defined so that we could customize the UI and maintain an information architecture that fits the freelancer type.
The result
We designed a product that was simple and easy to get around. We followed patterns from popular open banking apps like Monzo since there was an overlap in the users we were targeting. We also explored many AI quirks that eventually made it to the current version of Pallo.
Current Status
Status
Pallo has since gone on to raise a seed round and launch the app in the US.