Companies have to file employee tax information with federal, state, and local agencies to be tax compliant. If filings needed adjustments or corrections, they must be submitted through an amendment. The process to make and submit corrections to tax agencies was complicated due to different jurisdiction levels, a multitude of tax types, various categories of information to amend, and diverse filing intervals. Our goal was to design a tool that facilitated easy and precise input for accurate filings to the agencies.

For research, our in-house team of a product owner, UX designer, and both front-end UI and back end system developers were immersed in the everyday roles of a tax specialist. Together, we learned about the needs and motivations of tax specialists that work within company payroll departments. A few members of the team visited tax specialists and conducted contextual inquiries in their work environment, interviewing and observing them as they performed their work. We learned how meticulous and detail-oriented they were with numbers and figures. Research also involved evaluating the existing version of Amendment Input and analyzing the manual and participating in a training session for AdjustMate, a separate ADP product for creating amendments. There are multiple tools to create amendments for different business segments in ADP. One pain point was creating an amendment. Users were not clear when they actually completed creating their amendment. This led to some amendments laying in the system unfinished and not submitted. Another pain point was a lack of organization to the functions and features, which led to errors and amendments being rejected from the agencies.

Our design and development process resulted in an intelligent tool with a specific beginning-to-end process in creating an amendment. It would be the first in a larger tax product roadmap that utilized the newly established workflow.

UX as it is today and moving towards the future, boundaries between experiences will become increasingly blurred. Users should not have different expectations of enterprise software in terms of ease of use and functionality that are different from consumer experiences. For tax specialists, this software is their every day.

ADP was willing to re-evaluate its position in this space and disrupt itself to advance in its mission of being a more human resource. This submission is one example of this effort in providing software for tax specialists that feels more like the interactions they encounter outside of work. We hope that if we remove the menial and mundane part of their work, they can progress to more strategic tasks that will maximize their contributions to their company.