A rates lookup tool for tax teams · SaaS Enterprise
Tax Rates - Redesign
Acme Tax’s legacy tool technically let users find tax rates. But finding a rate was never the real job, and the clumsy experience made everything else around it harder than it needed to be.
ROLE
Product Designer
TIMELINE
8 weeks
The Problem
User pain point
Tax teams used rates constantly, not to manage rates, but to troubleshoot, validate, compare, and explain. Acme Tax legacy software forced people through a rigid, one state at a time and buried the answer in a separate window.
Business impact
Every one of the eight enterprise partners I talked to described the legacy experience as painful, friction that repeated daily across some of the largest customers.
Key Insights from Discovery
I was invited to join eight research sessions with enterprise partners across distribution, banking, energy, professional services, and retail. One of the few times designers got direct access to customers. Each session gave me 20 minutes to ask specific focused questions.
WHAT WE ASSUMED
“Rates are hard to find. A better search bar and cleaner table will fix this.”
WHAT THE DATA SHOWED
Finding a rate was never the hard part. The real friction came afterward when you had to compare it, contextualize it, and explain it to someone else.
Research Artifacts
01
The UI was overwhelming before it became useful
Acme Tax’s legacy software overwhelmed users by packing too much into a single view. Before users could even answer a question, they had to spend time cognitively filtering the interface to understand what they were looking at.
02
Rates were disconnected from the context users actually needed
No one used rates in isolation. Users had to jump between screens to piece together a complete picture. At one national retailer, a team member had to look up a store, find its Tax ID in a separate screen, then go back to rates just to understand what applied. At a global professional services firm, every new client onboarding meant cross-referencing Acme Tax against state portals and ERP data by hand.
One partner had to look up a store, find its Tax ID in a separate screen, then go back to rates just to understand what applied.
03
No export meant no easy comparison or reuse
One partner, a program manager at a large industrial distributor, needed to compare Acme Tax rates against his ERP data side by side. But the legacy software only exported PDFs, and PDFs do not filter, sort, or accept formulas. Without a usable export, users redid the exact same manual work every time.
RESEARCH PARTICIPANTS
Partner 1 — Distribution
Partner 2 — Banking
Partner 3 — Energy
Partner 4 — Professional Services
Partner 5 — Retail
Partner 6 — Retail
Partner 7 — Distribution
Partner 8 — Professional Services
The Process & Constraints
With three clear pain points and a refined brief, I moved into wireframes. I explored multiple directions to find a structure that addressed lookup speed, context, and export without requiring a full rebuild of the rates architecture.
During this phase, a partner pointed out that Tax Series, the backend engine that actually calculates the rates, already handled lookups instantly. In Tax Series, a user types an address or Tax ID and gets the rate immediately. The data was there; it just lacked a good user interface. I audited the engine's capabilities and used them as a blueprint for my wireframes. After testing a few ways to connect search, results, and details, I landed on a single continuous view to replace the legacy tool's separate pop-up windows.
I used Figma Make early on to quickly generate a range of ideas and rough iterations for the lookup and results experience, which gave me more directions to react to and refine before committing to a final layout.
The Final Solution
Search and results
Address or Tax ID input with an immediate rate display, minimal cognitive load for a fast answer.
Results show the full breakdown by state, county, city, and district upfront.
Export and Overrides
Export to CSV replaces the old PDF-only limitation, directly solving the ERP comparison problem raised in research.
Clear reporting on existing overrides, with expiration options so stale overrides stop causing down stream errors.
Contextual rate views
Embed rate information within location and store workflows to reduce context switching and screen jumping.
