Sr UX Designer, Oracle NetSuite

The ask

How might we enable accountants in Japan to easily and confidently generate the new consumption tax return form

Why

In 2019, Japan introduced tiered consumption tax rates and an updated consumption tax return form. Due to the new tax rates, the tax return form was significantly more complex.

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Research

I spoke with tax experts to understand the underlying business process and reviewed our existing database of insights related to the Japanese accountant persona, the user within the company who is responsible for generating the consumption tax return form.

What we found

• Due to the introduction of multiple tax rates, sales and purchase transactions have to be reviewed individually to ensure proper rates have been applied – this was a very time consuming process
• Japanese accountants preferred to print out lists of transactions and manually check off transactions that were accurate.
• Accuracy was of utmost importance in Japan – even with a certain level of trust with their accounting systems, the accountants still said it was important for them to check through all the figures.

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The design

Due to the inherent complexity of the consumption tax return form, it was important to try and reduce chances for error. I did this by:

• automating the calculation of figures (using system data) as far as possible
• using on-hover row highlight to ensure users associated the correct figures with the correct labels
• clearly distinguishing fields that are sourced by system data, editable fields, and fields that required user input

Due to our understanding of the Japanese accountant persona, I also designed in:

• drill-down functionality (from report figures to actual transactions)
• option to print the return form exactly as per the tax authority’s format
• ability for users to see each cell’s calculation formula (if they wished to)

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Testing and final product

Testing our designs with selected Japanese clients revealed the following:

• Users were delighted that the system was able to automatically generate most parts of the consumption tax return form.
• The drill-down functionality and option to print the return form exactly as per tax authority’s format were also well received.
• However, users preferred to view the return form exactly as how it appeared in paper form even though the current design reduced chances for error – hence we opted to implement the feature as such.

This was an important lesson in designing for cultural context — sometimes the ‘better’ design is the one users trust, not the one that reduces errors on paper. Designing for Japan taught us that.

Our final product respected this preference and was shipped to Japanese clients of Oracle Netsuite in time for the new tax season.