SELF-EMPLOYED SEGMENT AND A SIDE PROJECT THAT THRIVED

Working as a multi disciplinary team, we investigated and discovered what was important to the self-employed market in Brazil, concentrating on a tax bracket called MEI (Micro Entrepreneur Individual). This was something we did on our own time, and then managed to pitch to the leadership at Intuit Brazil and get it on the roadmap. This represented a TAM of 7 million people, growing at a rate of 1m a year since 2010.

Through our first hand investigations, we found out that the biggest complaint they had was that they knew they had to pay a monthly tax slip (about R$50, fixed amount), but they kept forgetting it. Actually, 59% of MEIs reported this issue to SEBRAE. This generates fines for them, and we kept hearing that they found the government’s website too annoying and complicated to log in, and some even resorted to paying accountants so they didn’t have to do something they considered painful and daunting.

Compliance is a pain. You might even enjoy keeping track of your money, but tax is a whole different story. If there was one thing our customer interviews showed, it was a pervasive uneasiness with doing their tax right.

We took every opportunity to show paper prototypes to customers during user interviews. This meant people were less likely to not want to hurt our feelings because the prototype looked too high def, and best of all: it allowed us to make changes on the spot and keep iterating right then and there.

Through these initial customer interviews we found that 85% of them weren’t aware they had the right to government benefits through paying their monthly tax. When they saw this stuff in the prototype, they had lots of questions.

Where we got to

MEI was released as an entirely separate SKU in Brazil, due to debut in October 2018. What was deployed is an MVP and only includes the tax slip part of the product, while the other parts of it (yearly declaration and benefits) will only come in later in the game.

We got integration with the government website, so people only have to type in their personal details and not only do we find their company, we keep connected to the system. This means they don’t have to remember any more annoying details or passwords, and they can be sure what they see is reflected on their official records.

New navigation and easier data input

The basis of this product revolves on data-in. You input your transactions manually, setting what is an expense and what is income, and with enough information in, you start getting insights into how you spend, where to save and which clients to go for. The problem here is making it as easy as we can to input data, because the only way customers get any value from the product is if they have enough information in it.

I was petrified when I realised the amount of steps we were forcing users to go through 6 steps to add a single transaction. Customer interviews from current customers and cancellations corroborated that 6 steps didn’t make an “on the go” experience that users felt was easy enough. I had a clear objective and a clear metric: make the adding transaction experience as frictionless as we could, and measure it through task completion.

Looking at the Android app first because over ⅔ of our users use Android over IOS, it seemed a FAB button could make for an easy access point, not only for adding transactions but also for quick access to other features in different tabs, like creating a report or adding a client. Benchmarking also suggested competitors and similar apps already used the FAB approach, which validated its widespread usage as quick navigation.

From the transaction screen you can now quickly shortcut to create a transaction, being able to choose from different transaction types or even frequently used. From the reports screen, creating a report also got shortcuts for report types, and from the home screen clients are now able to create a transaction, client, cost centre or add an account.

Once creating a transaction is selected, instead of the 6 steps we used to have (input transaction amount, choose transaction type, selecting transaction place, choosing a category, picking a client, and going through a further details screen) we went to 2 essential steps, which could be taken down to 1 in case the customer had pre selected the transaction type from the FAB: adding the transaction amount. Simple as that.