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The Belastingdienst is part of the Dutch ministry of finances, with almost 25.000 employees its one of the biggest governmental organizations of the Netherlands. They're responsible for enforcing tax laws and regulations, and for collecting taxes from individuals, businesses, and other entities within their jurisdiction.
We've been working with The Belastingdienst quite a while now, helping transfer a lot of services by optimizing them into digital products. In this case we describe the process of one of those transfers and take you through the different challenges and solution we came up with.
Starting the project, the concept of an online form and a status portal page was already in place. The first and most important thing was to test the concept with users before we took any steps in completing designs. So, after creating a prototype of the designs, together with the UX-lab, we ran a usability test.
We also made sure to speak with key stakeholders to find out where their problems were and what their goals were for this project.
Together with content writers, developers, testers, and analysts, we were able to combine business goals and user needs into concepts, prototypes, and finally, a working product.
We worked on a project to digitize and modernize the way citizens could make objection cases for income taxes, follow the status of their case, and add to their objection later by attaching more files.
Another goal with this project was to decrease the amount of redundant work for employees.
It was important that citizens made their case in the right manner. Which was a problem, people were sometimes unclear on what they needed to include to be complete.
Testing with users and feedback from the backoffice employees showed that the product was a significant improvement on the paperwork that once was. Citizens found it easier to make an objection case and called with less questions about the status of their case afterwards. Employees had less work on printing, entering data, scanning etcetera, making their work easier and more efficient.
Especially the need to be guided into structuring the objection in a way that is legally necessary was a nice improvement. We made sure everything the user needed to do or say was asked for in understandable bite-sized pieces, instead of explaining it and asking for a free format page of text. Which helped the user tackle complex matter themselves and make less mistakes.
