Case Study
Defining a more customer-centered approach to tax filing through confidence, guidance, and decision support
QuestTax (Questrade)
Impact
Defined opportunity areas and experience principles that informed QuestTax's early experience direction and value proposition.
Informed early product and experience strategy for QuestTax. Defined opportunity areas for creating differentiated customer value.
Client
QuestTax (Questrade)
Role
Senior CX Researcher — Product & Experience Strategy
Duration
~3–4 months
Context
Tax filing is often approached as an efficiency challenge: reduce effort, simplify workflows, and automate more. However, customer conversations revealed something deeper. Many participants described taxes as emotionally demanding, not because forms themselves were difficult, but because decisions felt uncertain. People worried about missing deductions, misunderstanding regulations, making costly mistakes, and not knowing whether they were making the right decisions. As Questrade explored entering this space through QuestTax, the opportunity extended beyond building another filing tool. The more important question became: what helps customers feel confident enough to file? That reframed the initiative from task optimization into decision-support and experience strategy.
Approach
Led qualitative discovery and current state journey mapping across various tax filing segments, and synthesis to help shape early experience strategy for QuestTax. The work included leading customer interviews and synthesis, identifying behavioral and emotional drivers, mapping opportunity areas across the journey, translating findings into strategic recommendations, and connecting customer insight to business and product decisions. The responsibility was ensuring customer understanding became an input into product direction before solution decisions became fixed.
Key Insights
Customers rarely struggled because filing tools alone were insufficient. They struggled because the overall experience felt uncertain, cognitively demanding, and difficult to navigate confidently. Friction patterns appeared repeatedly throughout the journey: uncertainty around changing tax rules and planning decisions, difficulty organizing and managing tax documents, confusion around eligibility and deductions, interpretation challenges during data entry, and anxiety around whether filing decisions were correct. Many DIY filers valued flexibility, lower cost, and independence, but still questioned whether they were making the right decisions. Expert-assisted customers revealed something equally important: many were not paying for expertise alone. They were paying for reassurance. Participants repeatedly expressed wanting clearer explanations, stronger guidance, educational support, and more confidence throughout the process. Speed itself was rarely the primary concern. Most participants were comfortable waiting for refunds if it meant feeling more confident that their taxes were completed correctly.
Strategic Impact
Three strategic directions emerged. Build confidence before optimization: support understanding before maximizing outcomes. Reduce interpretation burden: help customers make decisions without feeling responsible for mastering tax complexity. Increase guidance without reducing control: create support mechanisms while preserving transparency and ownership. This shifted the opportunity from making filing easier toward making tax decisions feel more manageable. Financial experiences are rarely challenging because information is missing. The bigger challenge is helping customers feel confident enough to understand, trust, and act on that information.
Next Steps
If extended further, the next phase would focus on making the experience more personalized and supportive through guided education, smarter onboarding, contextual support, and more adaptive recommendation experiences. The long-term opportunity is not simply simplifying tax filing. It is helping customers feel more confident making financial decisions overall.