Manual Data Upload Page

Introduction

For Taxdoo, user data is vital for the correct functioning of the product and of the compliance solutions.

As the Designer assigned to the Taxdoo Integrations team, We planned and released an iterative refactoring and redesign of the Manual Upload pages, starting with the upload of movement information. With close collaboration with the Product Manager and the Engineers,we devised a very lean release structure to release the page in multiple rapid iterations to fix usability and tech debt, as well as planning, in the long term to consoldiate all manual upload pages into a single manual upload page.

Challenge

The existing manual data upload feature, critical for capturing historical or complex sales movements, suffered from severe technical and usability limitations. High volume uploads frequently led to page crashes, and formatting errors were displayed within unmanageably long, static tables, forcing users (often accountants or operations staff) to painstakingly cross-reference spreadsheets and troubleshoot without adequate guidance.

Duration

2 weeks design

Company

Taxdoo (SaaS/FinTech - E-Commerce VAT Compliance)

My Role

Product Designer

Contribution

Full product design role, from the requirement to QA testing and iterative changes after implementation.

Key Outcome Metrics

⏱️ 46 %

Faster time to compliance via successful data upload

📉 32.8 %

Decrease in Support Tickets related to upload and formatting issues

🛡️ 100 %

Elimination of Critical Page Load Failures

🎯 17 %

Increase in First-Attempt Upload Success Rate

Results

Created and deployed an improved manual upload page, resulting in major usability improvements, technical refactoring to reduce maintenance efforts, as well as reducing customer support resources. This release was also a first step in the iterations towards implementing a global manual upload support for the product, that will slowly take shape as the multiple upload functionalities get refactored and implemented.

Designs

Discovery and Design

For this specific project, we decided with the PM to use as lean a process as possible to release fast iterations to enable the team to refactor the page during a time where the team had more capacity. We chose a lean and fast approach to quickly get our users some important usability improvements, tackling long reported issues. Chosing a fast iterating approach also helped us to also validate the designs and approaches iteratively, while also working towards a more global manual upload solution, so that we could plan a bigger but smoother consolidated solution for all types of manual uploads product-wide.

So after exchanging on the requirements with the PM and other relevant stakeholders, I quickly made some wireframes using design patterns commonly used throughout our product, while focusing on solving the main usability issues. After a feedback session with the engineers and validation from the PM, I was able to quickly deliver the UI designs. After some design critique from the other designer, it was ready for planning.

Test upload functionality

The first iteration after release was to add a functionality to the page, to allow users to test their csv file formatting somehow. With discussion with the PM about other industry standard patterns, we drafted first a "test mode" design, allowing users to enter a version of the page where they could try uploading their data and seeing formatting and ingestion feedback without actually ingesting the data and impacting their compliance data.

Concept change

The "test mode" concept had clear weaknesses, for example having different history tables, which means that user couldn't see when a test upload would have been made on the normal page. Thus, we wanted to offer a version where the user could quickly understand, in the history table, what happened recently, if they test-uploaded a file already, what the name of those files were, for example if a different user was taking over tasks of another user, this would be extremely useful for the users to be able to really understand what tasks they need to perform.

To solve this issue, I designed another version, where we offer the user an alternative "upload" button that would act similarly to the normal upload function but without actual ingestion. We also signal this clearly in the table with a "test" tag. Of course, proper tooltipping is necessary to reduce complexity on the page, while adding contextual information to reduce mental load for the users.