Project Overview

Flanagan Bilton, one of the largest property tax law firms in the nation, was a client of Pictoric’s. For my first ever UI/UX and product design role, I was brought on to the FBA team to design large-scale features for an application that ensured clients were paying the lowest possible property taxes for their portfolio.

Some of the features I was responsible for included: an invoice system for complex tax billing, an information request UI with internal messaging, and bulk edit operations.

Goals

• Create an invoice process that allows a client to pay property taxes for individual or multiple parcels

• Create a dashboard to highlight client tax savings, inform the user of upcoming events, and display documents and contracts associated with their properties

• Create information request process to allow communication with clients with the ability to view a response thread within the application

• Include ability to edit parcel settings in bulk

Achievements

• Features increased productivity by more than 70% from previous system processes

Tools

• Photoshop, After Effects

Project Details

Background

For this project, am going to focus on the FBA Invoice feature. Its purpose was to have the ability to create invoices inside the system, track them, receive client communications, and store documentation in a centralized way.

• Requirement: Only the invoice creation and reply workflow would be handled inside the FBA application, so there would not be a connection to third-party systems.

• Users: trained FBA employees

Discovery

• An invoice will belong only to one client and it will have one single type.

• An invoice will have a single identification number, which is going to be assigned after it is created.

• Invoice is based on these types:

  • i. Appeal Level (Assessor Level, County Board Level, State Board Level, Court Level)

  • ii. Quantity x Rate (Appraisal, Retainer, Hourly, Administrative Fees, Personal Property Fees, Filing Fees)

• Invoices will be created by year and will only contain appeals for the selected year.

• Appeals contained in an invoice must have a final disposition as reduced.

• If there isn’t an invoice note for a particular year, the system will show the latest registered or an empty field if it wasn't able to find one.

• Properties # will show only the count of properties without a paid invoice.

• Invoices will be a snapshot when they were created. All their values will never change.

• Payments will not be handled through the system.

• There will not be integrations with third-party applications.

• Paid invoices will be moved to History.

User Testing & Iterations

Testing was performed by my account contact at Flanagan Bilton along with a couple of other FBA employees. The development and QA teams along with the software architect also contributed to testing as development was taking place. Over-the-phone and in-person reviews were conducted to receive feedback. After feedback was gathered, design iterations were created and reviewed internally.

• Users: testing was performed by FBA employees, the development and QA teams, and the software architect.

• Design iterations: designs were updated based on feedback from user tests.

Final Thoughts

With this being my first UI/UX design project, I admittedly had a lot to learn about the process of going through initial documentation, to testing, and assisting the development team in making sure what we delivered was on point. I gained valuable experience while creating the invoice feature along with a few other complex features within the application. The experience gained helped tremendously with what was my first “zero to one“ product: Beyond4.

The application features received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the client, my account contact, and other FBA employees. The increased efficiencies due to the application features validated its potential to meet the needs of the client as some efficiencies were increased by over 70%.

I enjoyed working with everyone on each team and learned so much through user tests and reviews, iterative design processes, addressing user feedback, and leading creative presentations.

Marketing Video

In addition to my UI/UX design role, I was also tasked with creating a marketing video for Flanagan Bilton, which can be seen below.