Tax Maintenance

Hy-Vee operates more than 280 retail stores in eight Midwestern states, including Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wisconsin. Every item at every store needs to have the proper sales tax attributed to it in order to abide by state and local authorities. This information needs to be created to maintain with accuracy and efficiency. This is done through tax maintenance application used by corporate accounts as a single source of truth for the entire grocery chain. Accountants need to be able to create tax authorities, set tax rates, adjust rates based on tax holidays in a variety of other functions from a centralized system.

How might we create a tool that is centralized source of truth for corporate accounts to make self-service changes to tax rules and rates and set up new locations, reducing manual configuration required by many teams, while providing proper translation of data between multiple systems in order to ensure the proper distribution of tax monies to the appropriate entities, providing Hy-Vee, the confidence that items are being taxed and distributed accurately.

Create a React desktop web application that allows Corporate Accountants to create and maintain accurate sales tax information on all items for sale at all locations from centralized application.

Problem Statement


UX, Product Owner, and Tech lead collaborated together using a Problem Statement worksheet to answer questions like “What problem are we trying to solve?”, “How do we know it’s a problem?”, “Who are our users?”, “What are their goals and motivations?”, and “How will we know if we’ve solved the problem?” Once these questions were answered, we used this info to help craft our Problem Statement and align as a team on what we were trying to solve.

Application Discovery


We worked with the Product Owner, Tech lead, and Corporate Accountant stakeholders to walk-through and understand the current workflow in the legacy application. This helped us understand the requirements for the new application to be designed as well as any constraints. This was a lengthy process as this is a complex financial space.

Interviews
In a break for a more structured interview process that I might usually pursue, I had a regular cadence of conversations with the accounting stakeholders (who are the main users. In this case), to help understand their needs, pain, points, desired, workflows, constraints, and requirements. Building strong relationships with the team and stakeholders allowed us to gain a deeper understanding and trust as we get to ideate on solutions.

Concept Designs
I took the information we gathered from our users and began to wireframe concepts to accomplish each task while considering the complex data structure behind the UI. The wireframes were reviewed with stakeholders often to gather feedback and to iterate on the designs.

Prototype & Test


Once I settled on a solid design concept, I built a prototype in Figma. I then took it back to the accounting users for guerrilla usability testing. I synthesized the findings from the study and iterated on the design once again. This happened multiple times until we arrived at the final design.

Final Design & Handoff
 

The final design was created and annotations were made for the developers to reference. I continued to work with the development team to ensure the application was built to the specs of the validated design.

Corporate accountants now have a centralized system for creating a maintaining sales tax information for all items at all locations using a simple and intuitive UI. This has saved them time and effort as well as built confidence that they are correctly maintaining all sales tax information.