Services
Design system
User interface design
Interaction design
Information architecture
Tools
Figma
Timeline
January 2022 - Ongoing
TaxFix had secured a sizable investment in a Series D round of funding, making it a FinTech unicorn—a privately held, financial technology company worth over $1 billion. Its veteran Customer Relationship Management (CRM) team had been using the same emails practically since the company’s inception and needed a different approach that could scale as quickly as the department was ready to. Working closely with the CRM team and a talented content strategist/copywriter, I created a scalable design system based on the well-known Atomic Design methodology.
The atomic design methodology applies the hierarchical structure of organisms to user interfaces. Like living organisms, user interfaces are intricate systems of decreasingly complex units, with design tokens—such as color codes, text styling, etc.—representing the most basic building blocks, just as ions do in living organisms… maybe. I don’t exactly know, I’m a designer not scientist. This structured approach allows teams to quickly break down existing UIs and redesign them from the smallest component up.
The atomic design methodology applies the hierarchical structure of organisms to user interfaces. Like living organisms, user interfaces are intricate systems of decreasingly complex units, with design tokens—such as color codes, text styling, etc.—representing the most basic building blocks, just as ions do in living organisms… maybe. I don’t exactly know, I’m a designer not scientist. This structured approach allows teams to quickly break down existing UIs and redesign them from the smallest component up.
After a series of kickoff meetings, a majority of which were used to understand the meticulously crafted and staggeringly complex CRM messaging flow, I worked with the department’s creative lead to conduct a content inventory, the systematic breakdown, collection, and categorization of all design elements that were in-use prior to the redesign. After redefining the design tokens, I began to redesign the next most-complex UI elements—buttons, links, image frames, etc.—and reassemble them into content blocks, refining as I went to ensure that the content blocks would be more than just the sum of their parts. Once we had a rough idea of what the design system would look like, the content strategist and I collaborated closely with each other and the CRM team over the span of several months to continuously iterate on the designs and messaging and make sure we were crafting emails that addressed the underlying causes of user drop-offs.
Once we had successfully recreated every email of each flow, I created new designs for in-app banners that were used as touch points with customers who had abandoned various processes. The CRM team used A/B testing to measure the success of the new designs, and we were thrilled to learn that the new emails led to a noticeable decrease in user drop-offs.
The challenges: The biggest challenge was, without a doubt, understanding (and retaining understand of) the immense complexity of the various CRM flows. More than once throughout the process, no longer able to see the forest for the trees, we had to stop and reorient ourselves. The other notable challenge was accommodating the often conflicting needs of stakeholders from different departments. The product team had already built a scalable design system that was live in some countries Taxfix operates in but not yet live in others, including Germany. This meant we needed to create a system that could accommodate the eventual rollout of said system. This was made all the more complicated by CRM’s branding, which fits within the larger Taxfix brand, but uses an entirely separate color scheme and visual language from the rest of the company. Bringing these two things in line proved, at times, to be a difficult balancing act. However, the collective experience of the team helped make these challenges more manageable.
