Lower confidence
Needs plain confirmation that the job is done, a product that looks official and a clear route back to a person.
Design for reassurance first.
Turning a complex tax process into clear next actions.
Making Tax Digital changed a service customers had relied on IN-SYNC to perform. Luna had to expose status and the next action without turning tax mechanics into the customer's new job.
- Focus
- Digital tax experience
- Role
- Lead UX Designer / Web Developer
- Outcome
- Luna launched
Making Tax Digital crossed customer decisions, internal work and government systems.
The process moved across staff, Government Gateway, banking, documents, profile information and reminders. The design task was to make position and ownership clear without moving the tax mechanics onto customers.
The service had more than one path.
Tax, documents, personal information and bank recovery each needed a clear customer action and an owned support route.
The interface had to work across very different levels of confidence.
Customers ranged from running a business on a phone to never having used an online account for anything financial. Short by default and expandable on demand became a structural rule.
Middle
Uses banking and shopping apps but avoids official tasks. Needs ordinary words and visible consequence before commitment.
Design for explanation in context.Higher confidence
Runs the business from a phone. Needs the shortest viable route and detail only when it supports control.
Design for speed without hiding depth.The research gap stayed visible
Contemporary notes recorded unresolved questions about linking customer records, authorisation and what would trigger a support call. Where results are not available, this case study does not promote an assumption into a finding.
Digitisation did not have to mean transferring the tax work to the customer.
The product took on visibility. The service kept hold of the mechanics, with a small and deliberate amount of work moving to the customer.
Assisted service
Before
IN-SYNC performs the work. Customers call because position and next action are invisible.
Digitised handoff
The compliant failure
The old process is digitised faithfully. Customers receive the screens and the tax mechanics, whether or not they can act on them.
Deliberate responsibility
With Luna
Customers see where things stand and what only they can do. Staff and systems retain the tax work.
The service was complicated. Luna should not feel complicated.
The product exposed position, responsibility and the next useful action while the service continued to hold the tax mechanics behind it.
A responsive sequence built around the customer's next task.
Home establishes position, Transactions shows the financial overview, and the following screens move into classification, VAT and account information.
The navigation used words customers could say out loud.
HomePosition and next action
TaxSelf Assessment position
VAT“Am I MTD ready?”
DocumentsSent and produced
TransactionsPayments and deductions
AdvancesCredit and repayment effect
My DetailsPersonal information
Naming VAT readiness as a first-person question converted policy language into something customers could answer about themselves. “Yes” or “no” came before legislation.
Luna went live. The most important measurement decision should have happened before it did.
The available evidence shows a product and service model, not a quantified outcome.
What shipped
A navigation made from customer language, status before tasks, VAT readiness answered directly and financial consequences shown before confirmation.
The product preserved human support as part of the service instead of treating it as failure.
What I would change
I would define contact-reason coding, unassisted completion and time-between-handoffs before launch. Those measures are inexpensive to establish and difficult to reconstruct later.
I would also test the words harder than the layout. For this audience, the wording often is the interface.