Income Tax
Helping first-time taxpayers & senior citizens

Tax filing is unfamiliar, consequential, and full of opaque language.

The brief started as a question I put to myself: ITR filing is one of the few high-stakes services most people in India touch once a year, often alone. First-time taxpayers and senior citizens in particular need to understand where they are, what matters next, and how to recover when something is unclear. The design problem is confidence, not merely form completion.

• Audience First-time taxpayers and older adults navigating a consequential service
• Contribution Research, UX flows, prototypes, and user-testing materials
• Status Concept and prototype stage, validated with real participants — not built or shipped
• Constraint Protect participant privacy and avoid presenting portfolio content as official guidance

Before touching a screen, find out where confidence actually breaks down.

Rather than assume the interface was the problem, research combined four methods: secondary research across Reddit and X, attitudinal interviews, behavioural usability testing, and a competitive scan of what people said already worked elsewhere. It started with a direct outreach post to public tax communities, followed by five moderated conversations with first-time filers and senior citizens — the audience that self-filing crowd on those platforms tends to under-represent.

Secondary research — asking the community directly

Instead of only reading old threads, this started with a new outreach post across Reddit and X asking people who file their own returns what breaks down first: what's hardest to understand, how they figured out which form to use, and what they Googled mid-filing. Dozens of replies came in within hours, from first-time filers, seasoned traders, NRIs, and at least one practising CA.

• Form selection By far the most repeated question was some version of "which ITR form even applies to me?" — with no confident way to answer it inside the product.
• Redundant entry Salary, TDS, and broker data already sit in AIS and Form 26AS, but capital gains, dividends, and challan numbers still have to be typed in by hand.
• Terminology Section and schedule references (80C, Schedule FA, TR, FSI) appear throughout the form with no explanation attached to them.
• Recovery Validation is inconsistent — some mistakes are never flagged before submission, others surface as a notice months later.
• Silent defaulter risk The sharpest version of that: paying tax through a challan but forgetting to enter its details in the ITR draws no warning. The payment is real, but the return doesn't show it — and a "tax defaulter" notice can follow months later for tax that was already paid.
• Requests for a chatbot Several replies asked for one outright. Read next to the terminology complaints, it looks less like a request for AI and more like a request for help that doesn't require leaving the page.

Competitive analysis — the bar is already set elsewhere

Several replies didn't just name a problem — they named a competitor already solving it. That's a useful, checkable claim, so here's what each pattern looks like based on what people described:

This isn't a teardown of those products — it's secondhand, from replies, not a hands-on audit. The point is narrower: nothing here is a novel idea. The government portal is the one place people are required to use that doesn't yet do it.

Attitudinal interviews — five conversations with the harder-to-reach audience

The Reddit and X replies skewed toward confident, self-directed filers — traders, freelancers, people fluent in tax vocabulary. Five moderated conversations followed to cover who those replies mostly missed: three first-time filers and two senior citizens, filing without an accountant's help. Quotes below are paraphrased and composited to protect participant identity.

Thematic analysis

Grouping the outreach replies and interview notes together surfaced four clusters that mattered more than any single feature request:

Turn a dense process into a calm guided path.

Each decision below responds directly to one of the four themes above, rather than to a generic best practice.

• Guided eligibility, not self-selection Ask plain questions about income and let the sequence of answers determine the ITR form — instead of asking someone to pick from a legal list on day one.
• Reuse what the system already knows Pre-fill and reconcile against AIS and Form 26AS wherever the data already exists, and only ask again when something doesn't match.
• Plain language at the point of confusion Explain a term where it appears, rather than sending people to search engines and losing their place.
• Calm, correctable recovery Name what's mismatched and what to do next — including flagging a genuinely-paid but unentered challan before submission, not after a defaulter notice arrives months later.

On the chatbot requests specifically: read on their own they look like a feature ask. Read next to everything else, they look like a symptom of the same problem the plain-language decision above already targets — help that lives outside the flow instead of inside it. The design bet here was to fix that first, rather than add a chat window on top of a process that still doesn't explain itself. Whether there's a smaller, genuinely open-ended need underneath that — edge cases too specific for an inline explanation — is a real question for the next round, not something to assume either way.

Sketch the sequence before the surface.

Early exploration stayed low-fidelity on purpose, to test whether the sequence of decisions made sense before any visual design existed.

Test the calmness of the journey, not just task completion.

Wireframes went back in front of four of the five original interview participants in a second moderated round. Sessions watched for hesitation — where someone paused, re-read a line, or asked "wait, is this normal?" out loud — rather than only timing task completion. The original outreach posts also stayed open through this period, so some of what changed here came from replies arriving there, not only from the moderated sessions.

Not everything worked the first time. The earliest version of the Resolve screen stated the recommended form as fact, no way to question it. In testing, that read as more confident than it should — for something with real consequences, participants wanted a visible way to say "that's not right" even before they needed it. That's the one change that came from the design being wrong, not the research: the "that's not right" path only exists because the first version didn't have it.

Show the reasoning without exposing the service.

These are anonymised, illustrative interface concepts built to demonstrate the reasoning above — not screenshots of a live filing portal, and not tax guidance.

This is a portfolio case study, not an official tax service or source of filing advice. Reddit and X replies referenced here are paraphrased from public comments on the author's own outreach posts and are not attributed to individual usernames.

Trust is part of the interface.

The first round of testing validated the direction: guided eligibility, in-place explanation, and calmer recovery states changed how people responded in session, not just what they completed. It also exposed a gap this round didn't close: three of five participants filed in English despite it not being their first language, and "explain the term" doesn't fully address that — it was out of scope here, but it's now the first thing the next round should test properly, with participants and content in more than one language. The next iteration should also widen past five participants and keep tracking where confidence dips, not only where someone abandons the form. The original Reddit and X threads stayed open through this whole process and kept surfacing input on their own — the plan is to keep it that way with a testable version of this concept, rather than treating this write-up as the final word.