Lessons learned while designing a timeline

Timelines are everywhere, especially in social media: Facebook is a timeline of your life; Twitter is a timeline of your microblog musings; Path is a timeline of your photos and tags. Timelines have become so ubiquitous that not only do users immediately understand the interface and how to interact with it, but they are almost comforted by the layout.

But what about tax data? Can presenting something as confusing and ominous as historical tax data in a timeline put people at ease and allow them to more easily navigate and access important financial information?

I don’t know.

I wish I could say “Yes! And here’s why!” but that would be premature. You see, I recently designed a timeline to present users with a view of their tax history. Naturally and probably subconsciously, as a user of Facebook and Twitter, the first thing that came to mind was a timeline. Since this is the first tax season our users will be interacting with their tax data in this format I cannot speak to whether it is a successful way to do it or not. Instead, here’s what I learned along the way:

1. It doesn’t have to look like a timeline.

One of the most amazing discoveries was that the timeline didn’t have to look much like a timeline for people to understand what it was. The traditional, quintessential timeline is a horizontal, non-breaking line with points along it representing actions. The timeline I designed wasn’t even a single line. It was a series of vertical lines, grouped into expandable/collapsible sections. The only semblance of a timeline was that there were points along it that corresponded to dates. Somehow this didn’t stop users from understanding that this was a timeline of their tax history.

2. Anything that falls on the timeline should represent an action.

This may seem obvious. We’ve studied timelines since our history lessons in first grade. Every point on a timeline represents something that happened that is relevant to the subject of the timeline. But when we start plotting data, for example a tax refund amount, it becomes easy to start thinking in terms of the data instead of the specific action that the data pertains to. So instead of focusing on the tax refund amount, focus on when the user filed their taxes. Not only is it something the user can point to as an action that THEY took, but you can start hanging a lot more data off of it, such as supporting documents, order details, filing statuses, etc.

Note: Focusing on actions allows us to assign dates to the actions, which is the whole point of the timeline. Make sure to include these dates. They don’t have to be extremely prominent, but they should be present.

3. Don’t show everything at once…it’s overwhelming.

This is basic progressive-disclosure. I decided to show the most recent tax year and collapse everything else. This does two things:

1. it shows the user the most relevant information without overwhelming them, and
2. it teaches the user that they can expand the other years to see more information.

4. Show as much data as you can (without going against learning #3)

If given the choice to show more or less, show more. This came up a couple times.

Sometimes we find that customers will use our product one year, then not file with us the next year (presumably they file with a competitor), and the come back to our product the following year. So what do we show on the timeline for the year that they didn’t file with us? We could show nothing…or we could acknowledge the fact that they didn’t file with us and address the small number of users who might not have filed at all for that year. In that case we give them an avenue to file a late tax return, thereby helping the customer and winning their business.

Also, what about the customers who are using our product for the first time? We could show them nothing…or we could show them an empty timeline explaining what it will be filled with. This does two things:

1. It teaches the user about the timeline and shows them where to come back to in the future to access prior year returns, and
2. If they accidentally created multiple accounts it should bring this to their attention.

So that’s what I know for now. With tax season upon us, I’m sure I will have more insights to share in terms of how the timeline ACTUALLY works. Log into My TurboTax to take a look at the timeline!

Let me know what you think! Especially if you have designed a timeline yourself.

UPDATE (7/23/14): Just today we pushed out a design refresh of the timeline and I think it’s looking great. I didn’t previously include a screenshot of the timeline because it hadn’t been publicly released but now that it has been out for a few months and that we have done a design refresh it’s time to share!