Why Turbo Tax is Great (No Really, It’s Great)
Originally posted on The Andera Blog. Follow us on twitter @AnderaInc
A couple weeks ago Andera hosted a webinar on “The Future of Account Opening”where we asked Ying Chen, SVP of Product Management, and Jeff Kukesh, Senior Product Manager of Emerging Technology & Platform, about their vision for where online account opening and mobile account opening are going.
Sometime into the session, Ying mentioned that she wants to make Andera’s solution more like Turbo Tax. I stopped. Turbo Tax? Here are three things that I do NOT think of when I hear Turbo Tax:
- A smooth, futuristic experience that will give me that “wow” feeling
- The next big thing
- Anything remotely appealing
Why would Andera ever want to be like Turbo Tax? Then she explained. Turbo Tax does a great job at turning data entry—which is, of course, an essential part of any online or mobile financial product application—into a conversation.
So basically, instead of asking for information like this:
They ask for it like this:
And instead of leaving you to wonder or wander through endless appendices, they say “Hey, if you don’t know what I’m talking about not sure about it, click this friendly button!”
And instead of putting technobabble on the screen when the system is calculating, they do this:
Filling out forms online is pretty awful, we know. Turbo Tax makes that awful thing easier by asking for data with questions, not with labels, which makes sense; in everyday life we don’t talk in labels, we talk in questions. It isn’t perfect, of course, but it does do a pretty good job of making an inhuman process feel a little more human.
Ying is not alone; here’s another blog post extolling the virtues of the seemingly virtueless Turbo Tax, and Intuit just released this great Turbo Tax advertisement that highlights the user experience. And hey, pretty much anything beats this:
Man, somebody has got to fix those. Not the Obamacare contractor.
