INtuit
Turning mundane tax prep meetings into dazzling (and productive) VR experiences
As a principal designer for the Technology Futures group at Intuit, I tackled design challenges that were estimated to be a few years away from becoming significant opportunities to address. I was also basically a one-person XR design studio where I ideated concepts for experiments, developed strategy, designed apps, built prototypes, ran in-person research studies, and wrote results presentations for the team. One of those design challenges was how to scale a growing service that relies on virtual meetings to deliver the product to its customers: Turbo Tax Live.
The Concept
Design Approach
The Prototype
Results

The Concept: Tax Preparation Via Co-Presence In VR

The problem:
Turbo Tax Live is a tax preparation service where a Turbo Tax expert can meet with clients over a series of video calls to complete their tax filings. But compared to meeting with CPAs in-person, video calls tend to be less engaging and quite a bit awkward.
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The concept:
A VR co-presence experience that gives tax experts and their clients the feeling of meeting and doing taxes in the same room...without being in the same room. So rather than commuting around your busy city to meet with a local CPA and stare at the back of their computer monitor while they work, you can sit in your living room and watch a Turbo Tax expert's avatar deliver a delightful and immersive presentation of your tax preparation.

The Design Approach

There are quite a few important design elements applied in this prototype, and the overall objective was to create features that can not be achieved by tax experts either through video calls or in-person meetings. VR has significant interaction and form factor constraints compared to those two media, but also unique advantages, mainly copresence — the illusion of being in the same place and time with others — and the ability to immerse people in content and present it in a much more engaging manner.

Some tactical elements of the design were:

  • Positioning the tax expert and client to sit side-by-side to view content collaboratively (vs. the typical across a table adversarial seating).
  • Prioritizing voice input and speech-to-text transcription for data entry.
  • Converting flat and abstract tax line items into 3D objects in an organized layout to boost engagement and information retention.
  • Simple point-and-click interactions over complicated controller button combos.
  • Calm, playful, yet professional ambiance.
  • Closely match the information architecture and workflows that Turbo Tax Live experts rely on for consistently delivering the service.
  • Spatial layouts, interactions, and ergonomics that support tax experts' need for accessing a wide variety of content and documents in an organized fashion while running their meetings.

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The Prototype

To test the team's assumptions about the concept, I built a prototype that research participants installed and tested for our study. I used Unity and its XR Interaction Toolkit to build and deploy to Quest headsets.

And I utilized a full range of tech art skill to build this prototype: designing the spatial layout, interaction design, 3D modeling, lighting, custom shaders, lighting, and environment design.
Video Demo From Design Documentation: Adding Tax Items
Video Demo From Design Documentation: Step One Success Scene

Results And Research Synthesis

I did get some help with the research portion of this experiment: a design researcher planned sessions, recruited respondents, moderated sessions, and helped some of the results synthesis.

We ultimately tested two prototypes that generated useful insights about a possible future where activities like tax preparation can be done via immersive co-presence technologies. The insights can summarized as "immersive co-presence apps have significant potential and feasibility for improving both the tax filer's and tax professional's understanding of tax return content and engagement with the process."


Filers enjoyed the human-friendly 3D object representations and organization of content, and also a more collaborative view of their tax professional's work. Tax professionals appreciated the more "natural" feeling input methods of VR, the spatially organized content and tools, and the ability to deliver a much more engaging and effective client meetings via immersive features.
Slides from the experiment results presentation