Statements and Taxes

The road to building the self-serve, one-stop hub for all the statements and tax docs needs of 300+ million users.

300+ million users use PayPal. We needed to build a self-serve, one-stop hub to help our users get their tax docs, reports, and account statements.

The new hub had to meet the following objectives:

Improve the user experience for downloading various statements
Improve the discoverability of statements for users (IA)
- Offer the capability consistently on web and app
Provide a holistic experience for data collection from users (e.g. compliance flow for W8, TIN, etc.)
Adapt to new regulations for providing users tax documents (new thresholds for 1099K)
User education around the impact of new taxation regulations to them
Provide self serve capabilities regarding navigating their tax docs (resources, Q&A, etc.)

Business objective:

CVR (contact volume reduction) leading to a reduction in operation team’s headcount (IRO & CS for tax-related queries)
- Savings of $16M projected from 600 addition headcounts

Meeting Industry standards: competition provides capabilities across web and app.
Digital wallet app adoption (DAU)

Role I played: Lead content designer

Customer needs:

Users need tax resources and documents for filing taxes
Users need statements to reconcile earnings
Consumers are shifting towards using app for all functionalities

Legal, compliance, and regulatory needs:

In 2014, the IRS issued Notice 2014-21, clarifying that virtual currency is treated as property for tax purposes. This means that cryptocurrency is taxed as a capital asset and every taxable event must be reported on an IRS 8949 cryptocurrency tax form.
US-IRS Federal threshold change

Our objective:

PayPal has been constantly evolving its suite of products to include crypto, High Yield Savings account, and many more products that are in the pipeline. The changing regulation for casual sellers means that millions of users will now have additional tax obligations. Add to it all the millions of crypto users that will be looking for their tax docs on PayPal. We needed to build a new hub for all our users to find their tax docs and statements with ease.

Design challenges:

Build a native custom download experience whereas the rest should be in in-app web experience
Savings tax documents wasn't part of the phase I launch
Create a statement and tax experience for all types of PayPal transactions (Goods & Services, Crypto, Savings, and more)
The hub should also educate the users about filing their tax docs while being easy to use

My content strategy:

"Give our users an easy way to find and download the documents they need. We'll empower them with financial information in a friendly way so that everyone can learn about filing their taxes without feeling lost and confused. We are their knowledgeable friend who they trust to break down complex information in their language and who is always watching out for them. We'll use simple, conversational, and straightforward messaging and never riddle our users with jargons that make them feel not-as smart and reaffirms their mental model that taxation is complex."

Current pain points:

Not consolidated and easily discoverable
- “How do i find out how much PayPal’s fees I have paid in 2020 ?”

Cumbersome and slow (not fast/quick)
- “I need countless clicks including the date range selection, file format selection, download clicks. In addition i have to wait for reports to be created, This is a lot of time. Does PayPal offer a way to automate this?”

Unsure of what to do, needs help specific to his/her problem
- "I did not sell enough or have enough transactions to get a 1099 from PayPal. I need to know what numbers i need to put on my taxes as i am filing them. What specifically i need to report, and how do i find the correct information? Any help is appreciated”

Understanding the current behavior using analytics

1. Most of our users prefer using the Custom statements.
2. Monthly satement is the second most widely requested statement type.
3. Tax docs are requested mostly during the tax season.

Competition analysis

From Robinhood to Coinbase and Revolut, we looked at most of the financial apps to see how they had created the Tax doc hub on their platform.

User research

I worked with the designer, product manager, and UX researcher to prepare research questions and get answers to them using qualitative research.

Design jam

We conducted a design jam with different teams. We identified 4 themes:

Easy discovery
Ease of access (single place to access)
Insightful downloads
Post download experience

Explorations

Reviews, feedback, and converge

We took the design and content to many crits, reviews, and roundtables to ensure that we were at a happy place with the content and design. The next step was to get some user validation.

Prototyping and testing

User study results

Final results:

I took the learnings from the user testing and built on the final copy options.
To ensure I got it right, I presented in our community of practice, workshops, crew meetings, and senior leadership reviews.
A big shout-out to my fellow writers who helped me nail our Voice and Tone.
Legal reviews for a global launch: Each region had a unique commandment and set of offerings. I had to work with multiple lawyers to ensure that we went live with the right experience for that market. That also meant I had to do many last-minute edits to make the content more compliant while not missing stringent engineering deadlines.

Here are the final results for your eyes.