Role
Year
Duration
Company
Customer problem
Customers often misunderstand how Avalara calculates usage, especially for AvaTax, the company’s most used product. This leads to frustration regarding their bill, unexpected overage fees, and a high volume of support cases.
Business problem
Support cases are a costly as direct and indirect expenses. Customers frustrated with billing are less likely to be retained, and maintaining a large support infrastructure can cost millions of dollars.
Synopsis
We updated the information architecture so users could get a clear picture of their usage at a glance, and provided clear answers to common questions on the page, such as "How is usage calculated?" or "How many transactions have I used this month?"
The page is made up of three sections. The first section shows the account's billable usage against the term limit. The second section is a customizable bar chart that can be used to analyze usage trends.
The third section shows a table with daily usage data that can be downloaded and shared. The column headers communicate how transactions usage is calculated.
Context
Avalara, a tax compliance software company, bills customers based on their usage per product. For AvaTax, Avalara's core product used to calculate tax, usage amounts to the number of transactions used, which is broken down into API calls to the Avalara tax calculation service, invoices and invoice line items, and address validations.
We provided this formula in multiple places on the page so the user would know what makes up their billable transactions.
Who is this designed for?
Each Avalara account has a designated Billing Contact that receives payment-related communications, tracks usage trends, and pays open invoices. This user does not typically spend much time in Avalara products performing other functions, unless they’re a small business owner who does it all, so we prioritized creating an efficient workflow by making important information easy to access and understand.
Cross-functional collaboration
Requirements included, clearly communicating the number of billable transactions used against the limit for a given term, organizing usage by categories such as Integration, and communicating how usage is calculated, among others.
We included a flexible bar chart for the user to recognize trends in their usage activity.
Impact
As of 2025, this is a newly shipped experience, and we're still waiting to see how exactly we're impacting usage-related support case numbers, which is our primary objective. In the meantime, we've established a design framework that is already being used to build out usage pages for Avalara's other products.
We've gotten buy-in from customer support and engineering leadership, and are confident that the new experience will help users better understand usage and billing at Avalara. We'll continue to iterate on these designs as we gather customer feedback.
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