Role
Year
Duration
Company
For my efforts on this project, I won the Avalara Business Champion award in 2024.
In collaboration with Elijah Kull, Jerred Metts, Shubham Aggarwal, Dave Williams, and Gerry Chu.
Customer Problem
This was an extremely frustrating first-touch experience for customers, and created doubt in users' minds that Avalara was the right solution. Users were forced to reach out to Avalara for support during the setup process creating a more involved path to value than they anticipated.
Business Problem
A lengthy and painful onboarding process is more than enough to push customers away. Moreover, because many customers were opening onboarding-related support cases, the Support team's capacity to help customers who were already set up was greatly reduced.
Solution
We updated the 2nd onboarding step by reorganizing the task to fit the user's expectation, consolidating two previously distinct tasks into one flexible workflow, and providing contextual help to guide users through the task,
A couple of months after releasing the experience to the first set of new users, we'd reduced the average setup time from 52.5 days to under a day.
We redesigned the 2nd step of onboarding where users indicate where they've registered to collect and remit tax.
Context
Avalara provides tax calculation for businesses in over 12,000 jurisdictions, so that customers can collect and remit the correct amount of tax to the appropriate collection authorities. Businesses rely on Avalara to provide accurate tax rates and integrate seamlessly with their enterprise systems.
As one of the top-level initiatives of the year, the Product and Engineering organizations were tasked with understanding and addressing issues with the existing setup workflows in order to create a more simple and efficient onboarding process for customers.
To provide accurate tax rates, Avalara requires users to indicate the countries, regions, and local jurisdictions where they are registered to report tax, as well as the types of tax they report. This is the second of three onboarding steps.
Who is this designed for?
Although Avalara has many enterprise customers, small to mid-sized businesses typically have the most trouble with onboarding, and don't have the resources to assign dedicated setup teams or hire implementation partners.
For the first step in this task, users select states where they're registered to report tax. We added a fixed button set for all list screens, so that users didn't have to scroll to the bottom of a large set.
Course of Action
Collaborated with the other setup teams to agree on the overarching onboarding framework and unifying principles of progressive disclosure, flexibility, and simplicity.
Reviewed the existing experience and worked with the User Research Team to understand pain points.
Developed a new approach for the second step, emphasizing location over tax type, and defined specific requirements for the experience.
After users select states where they're registered, they're asked to indicate the types of tax collect in each state. For some states, Avalara requires the user to state their specific type of registration. We worked with engineering to provide a helpful questionnaire that can be used to make the appropriate selection.
In the original experience, local taxes were displayed in a flat list, with some states have hundreds to choose from. After speaking with users, we decided to organize local taxes by county, matching the way that users often register. Users can toggle the view to see the traditional jurisdiction table.
The majority of Avalara customers do business within the United States. The setup tasks for the U.S. are also the trickiest, so we start there. Once they're done with the U.S., the user has the opportunity to set up calculation in other countries, or save it for later.
Any local taxes that the user selected are reflected in each state card. Once the U.S. setup is complete, users get the chance to set up calculation for other countries.
An identical visual pattern persists with international calculation setup. Users are required to verify their registration in other countries with a registration ID.
Reflection
As a group, we succeeded in our goal of greatly reducing the time-to-value by making the onboarding process more simple and efficient. Moreover, we gained so many valuable insights during user research, collaborated across the company, and established frameworks that will inform future work.
With the second step complete, the user goes on to connect their business application to Avalara.
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