HMRC

To suspend or not to suspend an Agent

A tax agent firm needs an agent services account if they use new HMRC services to deal with their clients’ tax affairs. HMRC sometimes needs to suspend access to this account if, for example, the agent stops trading or does not comply with the law.

The Challenge

I was tasked with designing a service to enable the internal HMRC team to suspend an agent’s access to their agent services account or cancel an existing suspension.

The Process

Prior to kicking off this project, another designer had previously created some Balsamiq mockups to help with the discovery phase that the user researcher would be carrying out over the coming weeks.

balsamiq wireframes — Initial wireframes by another designer

Discovering the unknown

I began this piece of work with a 2-hour mini workshop where, as a team, we discussed the scope, current process, proposed technical solution, UX requirements and timelines for delivery. We also established that the users of this service (internal HMRC team) would be based in Newcastle.

After that session, I worked with the user researcher to plot out the steps that I thought users would take to suspend an agent or cancel a suspension and from that, expanded further on the initial wireframes created by the previous designer.

The researcher conducted interviews with the internal HMRC team and also presented my wireframes to them. Based on his findings, I created several more wireframes that I iterated extensively and presented them back to our team before building the first instance of the HTML/CSS prototype.

version 1 of the prototype — Version 1 of the prototype

Demoing the prototype to the team

Once the prototype was built, I demoed it to the researcher and content designer; both were happy for it to go through the first round of user testing.

While the prototype was being tested in Newcastle, I presented it to the rest of my team, which consisted of a Business Analyst, Product Owner, Developers, Technical Architect and our Scrum Master. From this meeting, some ideas and suggestions came out, which led to a second iteration of the prototype.

Findings and Recommendations

After the researcher presented his user testing findings to our team (based on the first version of the prototype), we became aware of a technical system limitation that restricted the internal HMRC team’s ability to search for agents that needed to be suspended.

However, we identified a solution that would enable the internal HMRC team to search for agents using a different unique identifier, such as a Unique Tax Reference (UTR) or Agent Reference Number (ARN). Based on this information (and other findings), I was able to add this functionality to the second version of the prototype.

research findings presentation slide — Research findings presentation slide

The Outcome

At the time, the UX team were engaging with another internal team at HMRC to test the second version of the prototype, and to understand if it met the user needs and those of the business.