Background

It is not possible for Dutch citizens to authorize themselves for the tax matters for a deceased family member online. The only way to arrange this is with a physical appointment at the tax office of the central government. The passing away of a family member is never easy. Grief is paired with the feelings of loss and sadness. Civilians are required to put in a lot of effort to get a small task completed; this includes traveling to the location, waiting time, and having an interview with a civil servant. Do we want to ask this from these grieving relatives? The answer is no. Next to this, a huge amount of man hours are needed from the civil servants, including staples of paperwork.

Problem Statement

The main goal of this project is to enable Dutch citizens to get online authorization for a deceased family member. Ultimately getting access to the tax matters. This wil most likely be an online form, which can be accessed from anywhere, at anytime. Thus speeding up the process and guiding the user step by step.

Process

Within the Belastingdienst, using the SCRUM method and working in an agile environment is key to a fast process. During this project, the following steps were taken by the UX-team:

Research

To kick-off the project, mapping out the present way of working was key. By accompanying civil servants at the office and during multiple civilian interviews, the designer was able to map out the current flow. Hereafter, a new design had to be made. An online form would be able to replace the current process as a whole. A new user flow was set-up, which included all the questions from a legal point of view. The challenge here was to make the form as simple as possible, not providing the citizens with loads of texts. The business stakeholders and UX-team met on a regular basis, ensuring that the design would fulfill their wishes as well. In the end, the online form was tested with a variety of users from the target group. This ensured the usability from the online product before going live.

Result

Users were able to navigative through the online form easily, meaning that there were no usability barriers found. After some last finetuning, the online form was ready to be launched. De Belastingdienst is stunned by the overall results, as 98% of the applications are now made online! Per month, the form is filled in by 5000 users, meaning that a huge impact has been made!