Case Study #5: Taxes and Tickets

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From the course by University of Minnesota

Introduction to UI Design

645 ratings

University of Minnesota

Introduction to UI Design

645 ratings

Course 1 of 5 in the Specialization User Interface Design

In this course, you will gain an understanding of the critical importance of user interface design. You will also learn industry-standard methods for how to approach the design of a user interface and key theories and frameworks that underlie the design of most interfaces you use today. Through a series of case studies on commercial systems - many of which you likely use on a regular basis - we will illustrate the benefits of good design. We will also demonstrate how the costs of bad design can often be severe (in user experience, money, and even human lives). You will then gain a high-level understanding of the user-interface design process. You will be introduced to common design scenarios - e.g. improving on existing designs and starting a new design from scratch - and the general design processes that tend to be used for each scenario. Finally, we will begin introducing the large body of existing knowledge on design by providing overviews of core user interface design theories and concepts. This key foundational information will help you avoid “reinventing the wheel” when you are designing your interfaces in this specialization.

From the lesson

Introduction and Overview

User Interface Hall of Fame / Shame5:33

Case Study #1: UI Disasters, including GPS fails10:33

Case Study #2: Corporate Value: Citibank ATM7:06

Case Study #3: Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon10:33

Case Study #4: International Children's Digital Library4:50

Case Study #5: Taxes and Tickets17:39

Case Study #6: AirBnB vs. CouchSurfing4:35

Meet the Instructors

Loren Terveen
Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Haiyi Zhu
Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Lana Yarosh
Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Dr. Brent Hecht
Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Joseph A Konstan
Distinguished McKnight Professor and Distinguished University Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering

Welcome back, I have one more favorite case study for you.

It's actually a pair of case studies taken together that look at the example

of user interface design as making hard processes easier.

Now we know that you as learners come from all over the world, but

I'm going to use an example that starts out as a very US centric example, though

I know there are some other countries that have exactly the same problem.

And the problem I'm talking about is tax preparation.

A little background for those of you who may not do this yourself,

in the United States, taxes are withheld when you have a paycheck.

In some other cases they may be withheld, but

the amount that you owe is not a simple computation from what you earned.

It's related to all sorts of other things, money that you may have earned

from other sources like a bank account that paid interest or an investment or

selling your house, a side job where you may not have to pay taxes.

And an immense number of deductions, deductions that you get for

buying an energy-efficient car, or making certain home investments,

or paying taxes to your state instead of the federal government.

All sorts of things come together.

This is a table that I actually took from the US Internal Revenue Service, and

it estimates the average burden for people in preparing their taxes each year.

And the average for all taxpayers, and

most of them are much simpler than this, is about 13 hours

of total time of which 4 hours is just filling out the forms.

For people who do the simplest form, what's called the 1040EZ,

which means I don't have a complicated tax situation, they're still

estimating an average of two hours just to get through the simple forms.

And then they turn that into a cost based on the things that you do.

But the important message here is that this is a burdensome enough thing that,

for a long time, people have paid other people to fill out their taxes for them.

They still have to keep records, they still have to do a lot of the work, but

just filling out the forms was immensely burdensome.

I'm going to add a personal note here.

I was one of those people who refused to pay anybody to do my taxes.

And for many years I took pride in the fact that I not only did it, but

I did it by hand.

I would get the forms, I would fill them out.

And then a number of years ago, it's probably now between 15 and

20 years ago, I got immensely frustrated with the fact that while I was

capable of doing the work, every time I

would run into a situation that required a new form, I would have to go get the form.

This time they didn't even have these online.

You'd go to a post office or a tax office to get the forms, bring them back,

start working again for an hour or two, and

then suddenly it would surprise you and say, guess what, you need another form.

And at that point, I gave up, and I decided to start using tax software.

There's lots of tax software out there, but

probably the most popular tax software in the US is TurboTax.

I just want to show you a couple of examples of how they took something

painful and turned it into an opportunity to make things work more cleanly.

This is a set of screenshots I took from 2015 when I was preparing my 2014 taxes.

And this is relevant because you're going to see some dates and

numbers in here, otherwise it wouldn't matter.

And so, the first thing that's sort of obvious,

but not obvious to the people who do this by paper,

is that most of the things that you do in taxes are the same year to year.

So the first brilliant thing they do, 60 seconds out of the box,

is they say, gee, if you used our software last year, would you like us to

start by copying last year's return and just wiping out the numbers.

What does that mean?

We'll have the list of all the places you got income from, your bank, your employer.

We'll have the list of all of the charitable donations that you made,

we'll know all the types of income and deductions that you used last year,

and we'll know to go through all of those.

Wow, that's a lot better than a paper form which just stands empty.

Cool, I'd love to do that.

And here it comes, and it gives me a bunch of information about me and

my wife and the forms that we used last year.

And the next thing it does is it comes back and

it does what's probably, this is not the first version of TurboTax.

It was probably the way that all of these have come to realize is the best thing,

is it says, you actually have choices.

It doesn't say this, but you have three choices.

It gives you two of them.

One of them is to say, you take over.

I trust the software, just guide me through everything one section at a time,

ask me all the questions you need to ask me, and when you're done, I'm done.

I'll point out that along the way as you put data

in it starts giving you information about your refund.

If I had purchased the state product, which I hadn't yet for this, I did

afterwards, it would show me how I'm doing on my state taxes, come back to that.

And when I'm finally done it will go do a wrap up and finish up and

allow me to file.

There's a second option, which is relatively newer in this product,

saying I'll explore on my own.

I could go in here.

I think I, no, I don't have the screenshot from that.

And it will give me a list of all of the kinds of income that I want to do, and

then all the kinds of deductions and say go into whichever ones you want to do.

What are you ready for now?

What do you think you need to do?

And you tell me what topic you want to cover, and I'll drive once you get there.

I'll ask you when you say, I want to look at employment income,

we'll go through your employers and record your employment income.

Now, there's a lot more in this that makes it a successful product.

The key things, it simplifies the process.

It turns something that was lots of paperwork

into something that's somewhat centralized.

It is immensely effective at reusing data.

Now, I talked about one example of reusing data from prior returns.

It reuses data from place to place.

If you're filling out taxes on paper, there's lot of cases where you go

to a form, and it says copy the number from this other form, line 28, or

fill out this workbook and copy the number that appears on page 25, line 16.

TurboTax does all of that for you.

That's what computers are good at.

It reuses data from your federal return to your state return, whereas if you go

a state return on paper right now in the US, it almost always starts by saying,

get out a copy of your federal return and start by copying numbers.

But it does other forms of reuse as well.

One of the things that's been a feature that's added in

recent years is the ability to look up much of the data

if that data was posted to a national repository.

So most employers and many banks and investment companies will put their

data online, and you can get TurboTax to just go get the data and import it.

And in fact if you want to use their system to keep your books,

if you run a small business, it will just import it from

your small business software or your personal finance software.

It makes your progress visible as you go along, and

it integrates help along the way.

I didn't show you this, but at every step along the way as you're going through

questions, there's a list of possible help topics on the side, and a place to ask or

search for answers if you don't know already.

They took a simple process.

And we'll take one more of these.

That's the process of buying secondhand tickets.

Sometimes this is called scalping.

In different jurisdictions in the US, and frankly, around the world, the rules

about what happens when you've purchased a ticket to an event and want to sell it,

or when you want to buy a ticket that somebody else has already purchased, vary.

There are places where it's completely illegal.

There are places where it's legal, but not on site.

There are places where it's regulated in different ways, but it was a pretty

common practice, and actually still is a pretty common practice.

If you wander up to a stadium in the US,

in Europe, in many places I've been in the world and don't have tickets, and

maybe the event is even sold out, or at least all the good tickets are sold out.

There's a bunch of people hanging around with signs that say something like,

tickets, or I have tickets, or I'm buying tickets, or I need tickets.

And these people are ticket brokers or ticket scalpers.

They make a market by buying tickets from people who are trying to get rid of them,

and selling tickets, they hope, at a higher price to people who want them.

But it's always been a sort of, well, how do we put this politely, sleazy market.

You don't know if you can trust these people.

For one thing, you're not always even sure that the tickets they have or real, or

when you try to go to the gate, will they say, wait a minute, these were stolen,

you can't use them, or they're counterfeit.

You don't know if the price is any good.

This was an opportunity where computers could make things better with

an easy-to-use interface.

And I'm going to just show you one screen from a site, StubHub, that has been one of

the leaders, not the first, not the only, but one of the leaders in doing this.

For those of you who like local information,

I'm showing you a picture of StubHub for

the Green Bay Packers playing at the Minnesota Vikings at

their new stadium, US Bank Stadium, fall of 2016.

This screenshot was taken in the summer of 2016, before that stadium opened.

And the first thing you'll notice is there's a map of

the stadium, there's a list of tickets for sale with prices.

And I could actually hover over any section in the stadium and

find out how many tickets are available at what price.

I only did that for one of them here.

This is among the better sections that you can watch a game from.

And for just $2850, I can get a ticket to

watch this momentous and historic game.

I'm not planning to go.

2850, not $28, $2800, a little beyond my budget.

Actually if I came over here, I could get tickets in this area for only 1,000.

And in fact, this is sorted to show me the cheapest tickets.

I could, if I wanted to go,

and the problem of course is you sort of have to go with the family.

You can't just take a ticket and go by yourself.

But if I did want to go by myself, I could sit in the upper corner,

section 303 or 302, row 21,

for just $272.

Okay, you're not going, I'm not going.

But what do we learn from a site like this?

For one thing, the computer system created visibility.

Knowing what the going price is, and people who buy and sell tickets know that

when you try to sell them early, you try to get a lot of money.

And as the game gets closer, you see if you have to lower your prices.

If I did have tickets, let's say I was lucky enough to have a bunch of tickets

here, I would recognize that, wow,

If I want to try to get money for them, I should probably ask for close to $3,000.

That seems to be the going rate.

That's useful to know, and I could watch that going rate.

If I'm thinking about buying it, I'm not talking to a guy

on the street who I don't know, and I don't know whether to trust.

I can look and say, well, if this person told me there's nothing available, but

I've got two tickets in the corner, and it's only $600 apiece for

the two tickets, I can look up here and say, well, buddy, you're full of it.

I can see there's lots of tickets under $300,

and they're just as good as those tickets.

And similarly, with all that information,

I can make effective decisions about where do I want to be on the field.

In fact, if I select a subset of sections it will let me sort, it will let me filter

by how many tickets I need, other requirements that I might have.

There's other properties I can look at, like do I really want to be on an aisle,

do I want to be in an enclosed section, other things like that.

It makes browsing convenient, and this is not something that was innovative for

StubHub.

The ticket sellers who were selling first run tickets started doing this as well.

Those of you who are older, like I am,

know there was a time when you wanted to buy tickets you had to go somewhere.

And you'd go and you'd say something like well, I need two tickets,

what do you have?

And originally there would actually be stacks of tickets, but in the first round

of computerization, they'd say, well, the best we have is this.

Here are the price ranges we have.

There was no good way to get a map of what was really available,

because what they said was the best may not be what I like.

Maybe I'm willing to be higher up in order to be central compared to other people.

Well, places like Ticketmaster and

its competitors put in systems where you could see that online, and

you could actually even look at it if you were buying them in person.

And that's evolved into systems like this today.

And finally, you're seeing the idea of technology serving as an intermediary.

The technology is connecting the seller and the buyer.

That intermediary was always there most of the time.

You could buy tickets through classified ads, but

mostly people would feel they had to sell to a broker and buy from a broker, and

now it's just a more transparent, easier and sometimes even instant intermediary.

So what are the lessons learned from these case studies?

First, if you really want to make a difference, go find a painful process and

make it easier.

Second, when we talk about the user interface, it's really easy

to think that all you care about is buttons and labels and menus.

But the interface is about more than just the look on the screen.

It's more even than just the usability of, can I figure out how something works?

It's about the control that a user get,

it's about transparency, it becomes an agent for building trust and much more.

The interface is the way that your system interacts with people, and

that's a huge step as you're going forward.

Finally, if you're thinking about, gee, I wish I could do something innovative and

successful, there are an immense number of opportunities out there.

For every process that somebody has come up with a great solution for,

there are still processes left out there that are sitting painfully difficult.

Now you could pick your favorite one.

Maybe it's the challenge of getting a driver's license in a particular area,

waiting in line in order to get a ticket so that you can wait in line.

And could you turn that into a system that speeds it up and

makes it more efficient for both the workers giving you the license and

the people getting the license?

Government processes often fall into this painful step, but

there's also lots of private processes.

And let's remember, that's where the big successful companies,

the Amazon.coms and the others out there, they made their money by finding

something that was a hurdle for people and removing that hurdle.

Good luck, go out there, learn what we have to teach you and go do great things.

We'll see you soon.

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