How we used a design sprint to develop a redesign concept of Kenya’s online tax platform

This is a story about a GV style design sprint. If you’ve never heard of that, you can learn more here or read the book.

By law, all Kenyan citizens are required to file their taxes on a yearly basis. A couple of years ago, one had to do this manually. Governments across the world have been seeking to leverage technology to improve service delivery. The Kenyan government wasn’t to be left behind. Kenya Revenue Authority, Kenya’s tax agency, launched iTax about 4 years ago. The platform allows taxpayers to file their returns online.

A research study conducted by the research team at iHub exploring how governments in East Africa are using technology to improve service delivery to citizens named usability as a big challenge across almost all government platforms in the East African region (full report available here). Instead of just publishing the research findings, iHub research resolved to explore further by demonstrating how governments could do better. It was at this point when we got involved. I am the co-founder of Tanasuk Africa — a design thinking and software consulting company working with organizations building or looking to build products for African markets. I led the team that planned and executed a design sprint to rethink iTax, Kenya’s online tax platform, using a human-centered design approach.

Participants going through the different exercises during the design sprint

What question did you want to answer in your sprint?

Being an exploratory exercise, in the beginning, we had a broad goal of redesigning the iTax platform using the human-centered design approach. This would allow us to demonstrate how governments can improve service delivery by focusing on their users.

Seeing that the goal was quite broad, we started off by breaking it down further. Participants listed the different issues they faced when dealing with taxes. This consolidated into four broad items. A straw poll helped us narrow down on tackling usability issues as the goal of the sprint.

The consolidated areas of explorations and questions we were seeking to answer

Who was on the sprint team?

For the sprint, we had a good mix of different players in the taxation ecosystem.

• KRA team with members from the innovation and iTax departments, to aid in demystifying iTax and the tax laws.
• iHub Researchers, to give background to the problem at hand and insights on the users, in our case citizens. The research lead, Tess Wandia, was also the decider
• An accounting expert, someone with a deep understanding of the process of tax returns in Kenya.
• Localization expert, someone with experience adapting and translating a digital product to a specific country or region.
• A representative of persons with disabilities from the Kenya Society for the Blind
• Most of us also doubled as frustrated iTax users
• The sprint was facilitated by myself (Kennedy Kirui), Joy Kendi as the co-facilitator, Dennis Muthuri doing prototyping, and Eric Asiago doing the visual design. We are all from Tanasuk Africa.

How did you make your prototype?

Monday allowed the sprint participants to delve deeper into the challenge. On Tuesday, we started generating ideas by sketching competing ideas and jointly narrowing down on the most promising ones. On Wednesday, we started off by setting an ambitious target for the prototype to be tested — allow users to file their income tax in three easy steps. This statement acted as a guide for the storyboarding exercise.

Groups working through the storyboarding exercise

A participant presenting the user flow they developed as a group

Most participants were not confident sketching in the beginning but quickly caught on

By the end of the sprint on Wednesday, we had most of the storyboards completed. There were a couple of incomplete ones. On Thursday, Eric and Dennis Muthuri took on most of the work. Eric turned the storyboards into visual designs using Adobe Illustrator. Dennis then created interactive prototypes using Preact JS — a fast 3kb alternative to React with the same modern API. He wrote here about where he chose Preact JS.

We had quick feedback sessions during the prototyping session on Thursday

At the end of the day we had:

• A redesigned home page
• A new dashboard for logged in users
• A process for filing income tax

This was deployed on a subdomain EasyTax.iHub.co.ke that we had set up earlier in the day.

The landing page

On login, this was the new user dashboard

The 3-step income filling process

A bit of work went into simplifying the tax breakdown

What did you learn from the test?

On Friday, we finally got the chance to put what we had worked on all week in front of users and get feedback. We wanted to understand if our simplified communication strategy and the three-step filling process worked. It did! It also answered our big question — governments can improve service delivery by focusing on their users. For the test, we had set up a domain easytax.ihub.co.ke. Some users came with their own devices while others used ours.

We tested the prototype with 7 users

What’s next for your project?

The design sprint approach and outcomes formed part of the report done by the iHub research team. It helped the team move beyond just publishing findings and instead allowed them to demonstrate a better approach. The prototype is also available publicly at EasyTax for any interested parties to play around with.

What worked/didn’t work about the sprint process?

What worked:

• Even though it was difficult at first storyboarding and sketching helped the participants share their ideas
• Straw polls helped the participants quickly narrow down on the most promising areas and at the same time allowed everyone to get their voice had
• The step-by-step sprint process ensured we were on track

What didn’t work:

• It took a bit of time for most of the participants to catch on with the approach. This was expected but day one ended up being harder than envisioned

Did you make any modifications to the process?

We stuck to most elements of the process. On Friday, we only had one room for testing as the set up for an observation room was difficult based on the location.

Will your team sprint again?

Yes! We have used it as a way to kick off a fair share of the projects we undertake.