Designing for Financial Empowerment

Service design · strategy | TAX TIME SERVICES

New Yorkers with low incomes often pay hundreds of dollars for tax preparation when they may qualify for free, high-quality tax services in their communities, and many who are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) never claim it, leaving thousands of dollars on the table each year.

“Designing for Financial Empowerment” as a collaboration of Parsons DESIS Lab (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability) with NYC Department of Consumer Affairs Office of Financial Empowerment (OFE) and Food Bank for New York City, re-imagines the way free tax preparation services are delivered in New York City.

 

Roles 

Senior service designer and co-lead: project scoping, research planning, stakeholder interviews, co-design planning and facilitation, analysis and synthesis of research and co-design outcomes, service blueprinting, service mapping and visualizations.

 

PROCESs

DISCOVERY

  • Background research

  • System diagramming

  • Stakeholder interviews

  • Contextual observation

  • Thematic analysis

  • Stakeholder personas  

CO-DESIGN

  • Ideation sessions

  • Journey maps

  • Synthesis sessions

  • Evaluation frameworks  

PROTOTYPING  

  • Service blueprinting

  • Touchpoint modelling

  • Paper prototyping

  • Interaction roleplaying

Conducting research on paid and free tax services around the city.

Manipulating discovery outcomes to produce content for co-design sessions.

Synthesizing discovery outcomes to produce content for co-design sessions.

Ideation cards communicate the challenges from discovery findings in a playful way.

Ideation cards communicate the challenges from discovery findings in a playful way.

Co-design participants sharing their ideas.

Co-design participants sharing their ideas.

Ideation cards

Blueprinting new service proposals

Service prototype session for the VITA Portal

IMPACT

This project resulted in the Virtual Tax Prep and Assisted Self-Preparation service programs and a novel service model which empowers employers to host tax preparation sessions for their low-income employees, avoiding low-quality, high-expense predatory alternatives used by financially vulnerable New Yorkers every year.

Based on the success of the service design process applied in this project, the New York City government launched its own service design studio.

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