Why Turbo Tax is Great (No Really, It’s Great)

Melanie Friedrichs for the Andera Blog writes: Andera just 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:

1. A smooth, futuristic experience that will give me that “wow” feeling
2. The next big thing
3. 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.