Tax-compliance questionnaire for small businesses

Problem:

Spring 2022 saw the release of Avalara for Small Business (ASB), a version of Avalara’s sales-tax compliance suite tailored to small-business customers. Not long after, product management noticed that many users signed up for a free trial but never finished onboarding, and thus didn’t end up buying the paid version. User research found that many people didn’t understand what they signed up for and needed more guidance to find the right solution for their business.  

Solution:

My team built a guided questionnaire to help small-business customers decide which Avalara products were right for them. The questions would be variable and easy to iterate on, and customers who weren’t a good fit for ASB would be presented opportunities to buy or learn about other Avalara products.

Discovery and research

The discovery phase of this project was extensive and had three main components:

Questionnaire design and behavioral research

We analyzed survey-building tools from companies like Survey Monkey and Qualtrics to identify common building blocks in a web survey. I also looked at research on survey progress indicators, an important component of a multistep system since they provide system visibility.

The main conclusion I drew is that, while changing the form or behavior of a progress tracker can influence a user’s perception or enjoyment of a survey, there’s no definitive answer to what kind of progress tracker is most effective. Instead, the most important variable in whether someone completes a web form is their initial expectation of how long it will take.

Interviews with small-business owners

After consulting with product management, marketing, and customer support, I wrote an initial list of about 15 questions. Our user research team showed the questions to 10 small-business owners on UserTesting, where they were asked both to answer the questions and to tell us how they felt about them. 

Afterwards, I listened to each interview and took notes. My most important takeaways:

  • When discussing sales-tax concepts, keep it simple. Some business owners knew about things like local jurisdictions and tax exemptions, but many more didn’t.

  • Don’t be afraid to ask probing questions. We worried that some people might hesitate to answer questions from an online survey about the size of their business or its revenue, but no one was.

  • Don’t condescend. Small-business owners are proud of what they’ve built. So while it’s important to simplify tax concepts, the questionnaire should talk to these customers like they’re experts on the business they run, because they are.

Cross-team whiteboard sessions

I met with product management, UX design, marketing, and user research to review the questions we showed customers, evaluate their responses, and begin mapping how this questionnaire might look. We pared my initial list of 15 questions down to seven and determined the points at which we’d guide customers out of the questionnaire if they weren’t a good fit for ASB.

The work

The outcome

Both the UX for this project as well as its underlying technology were finalists in a company-wide hackathon. This brought visibility to the templatized questionnaire we built. These components are now incorporated into the company’s design system and can be leveraged company-wide. They also provide the framework we used to build another guided online buy experience.