Eric Eichbauer | User Experience Designer

OVERVIEW

Thomson Reuters Data Hub software is a centralized tax data repository for large sets of corporate tax data that is distributed to all applications within the ONESOURCE platform. More about the product here.

Over the course of a year I was the single designer for DataHub working closely with three PMs, two development teams, and a researcher. I used the tools provided by Thomson Reuter's design system - Bento. Our process involved continuous user research with an interactive prototype, and several rounds of iterative design until it's release.

Problem
Applications within the OneSource tax software suite required users to enter and maintain the same tax & accounting information for each application throughout the suite. Our customers were finding the process time consuming, error prone, and inconsistent throughout each application.

Our solution
Master data sets. Provide a central location where administrators can enter and maintain tax information which can be accessed by all ONESOURCE applications.

There were three types of datasets I designed to be added to the system. Each one would need a way to be entered manually or imported, as well as management abilities. I took one set at a time, iterated with internal feedback until we arrived at a place we thought was good to test. The final products were interactive prototypes. I would repeat this process three times until all datasets were validated with users.

In addition to the problem we were solving, we added an additional feature that would allow our users to classify their data in greater detail. It was a new concept we called financial hierarchy.

GOALS & BUSINESS VALUE

• Save customers time by decreasing maintenance & processes
• Provide greater data uniformity across all user products
• Increased ease of onboarding additional products
• Provide additional data organization

The business value for us was increased customer satisfaction/retention, capabilities selling point to new customers as well as a selling point to current customers to add on additional products.

One dataset was particularly dense in data manipulation during the import process. I relied heavily on my product team’s input, whom all had expert domain knowledge. In this first step of the process we're asking user to assign columns to their uploaded data.

In the second step of importing this dataset, users could further refine what they had defined in the first step. I tried to do this in step one but it was too much for one interface so I separated it out into it’s own step.

RESEARCH

We held three formal usability tests and I had a few small guerilla sessions on my own. I wrote the initial scripts before handover to the researcher and we would flush out questions/scenarios as a team. For each test we held one internal session to work out kinks and 4 to 5 tests with actual users. We used a user rating scale as well as captured qualitative data through conversation to validate our design.

FINAL THOUGHTS

My biggest challenge was tax comprehension. Many of the concepts are esoteric so I had to rely heavily on my product team who had great knowledge in the area. DataHub launched and is a current Thomson Reuters product.