Tango | 2024
Design a tool that allows Tango employees to create and manage tax entities and link them to customer accounts in order to support IRS reporting when recipients earn $600 or more in rewards annually.
Partnered with Product to unpack and translate complex tax collection requirements into actionable design goals
Conducted interviews and testing with Tango employees who would use the application
Designed the end-to-end application experience
Collaborated with Dev to scope, refine, and prioritize features for implementation
Before diving into the employee-facing tool, this section provides context on how tax collection fits into the recipient flow.
The flow works as follows:
Reward Sent – A company uses Tango’s customer portal to send a recipient a reward.
Reward Received – The recipient gets an email containing their reward.
Redemption – Clicking the link takes them to Reward Link, Tango’s flagship product, where they can redeem their balance from a catalog of dozens of gift card options.
Tax Threshold – If the recipient has earned over $600 in rewards within a calendar year, they are required to complete a W-9 form during checkout.
Compliance – Tango files the W-9 and reports on behalf of the customer, ensuring the company remains compliant with IRS regulations.
The primary user for this tool is an onboarding associate, responsible for getting new customers set up to send rewards through Tango’s portal. At first glance, the task of enabling tax collection might seem as simple as turning on a switch. But in reality, customer accounts are far more complex.
Tango’s account structure works as follows:
Customer – The top-level organization.
Platform – A customer may have multiple platforms (e.g., HR, User Research).
Group – Within a platform, groups manage rewards for specific teams or functions. For example, HR might have one group for recruiters giving onboarding rewards and another for associates distributing employee recognition rewards.
Account – Groups contain accounts, often tied to specific budgets or use cases (e.g., holiday rewards, employee anniversaries).
Adding to the complexity, tax entities don’t align neatly at the customer level. A tax entity represents the legal business identity (with its own EIN) that Tango uses to file IRS reporting on behalf of a customer. A single customer may have multiple tax entities, and each one could apply at the platform, group, or account level depending on how rewards are distributed.
The diagram above illustrates this complexity: tax entities must be mapped across multiple levels of the customer’s organizational structure, while still ensuring that recipients are properly reported when they cross the IRS threshold.
Tango onboarding associates need to be able to create and manage tax entities in a way that feels seamless—so natural and efficient that it hardly feels like additional work.
The first iteration structured the overall UX for creating a tax entity as a step-by-step wizard. Within this flow, assigning the entity was just one step, using familiar UI patterns like radio buttons, drop-downs, and checkboxes:
The user first selected whether the tax entity should be assigned to a customer, platform, or account.
If assigning to a platform, they would then choose which platform to apply it to.
Additional assignments could be added at the platform, group, or account level as needed.
When I tested this design with the onboarding team, several key challenges emerged:
Incomplete information – A wizard assumes the user has all required inputs upfront, but onboarding associates often need to return later and add details over time.
Scale limitations – The assignment process became unmanageable when applied to real use cases. I learned that associates might need to assign a tax entity to 50+ accounts at once, making this approach cumbersome and inefficient.
This feedback revealed that a rigid, sequential wizard wouldn’t meet the needs of onboarding associates, who require a more flexible and scalable way to manage assignments.
In the second iteration, I restructured the UX around a to-do list model, where onboarding associates could complete tasks as they were ready. This approach gave them flexibility to work over time instead of being forced to provide all information upfront.
Within this structure, tax entity assignment became one task in the list. To support scale, I introduced a custom picker: associates could search for platforms, groups, or accounts by name or ID, select them, and add them to an assignment table.
When tested with the onboarding team, this approach resonated strongly. They appreciated the flexibility of completing tasks incrementally, and the custom picker made it easy to assign entities across dozens of accounts efficiently.
When reviewed with engineering, two major issues emerged:
Data model mismatch – At the time, Tango’s system only supported assigning tax entities at the account level. Extending this to platforms and groups would require significant backend changes, delaying the timeline into the new year.
Custom component overhead – The custom picker was not part of Tango’s design system and would have to be built from scratch, further increasing scope.
Because the feature was tied to the upcoming tax season, these limitations made this design infeasible to ship on time.
Jane, an onboarding associate, needs just enough tooling to manage tax entities effectively before the 2025 tax season—a hard deadline—without feeling overwhelmed or slowed down by unnecessary complexity.
Because of system limitations, onboarding associates could only assign tax entities at the account level, not at the platform or group level. While this slowed down the process compared to earlier concepts, it was critical to design a solution that:
streamlined the workflow as much as possible,
avoided introducing custom components, and
could be delivered in time for the 2025 tax season.
To accomplish this, I conducted an audit of the broader internal application to identify reusable components. I found a multi-select picker already in use by content managers, who leveraged it to add or remove hundreds of gift cards from customer accounts. This component allowed users to search, select multiple items, and apply changes efficiently.
Repurposing this component proved to be the ideal strategy. Instead of selecting gift cards, onboarding associates could use the same picker to search for and select accounts, then tie them directly to a tax entity.
This design balanced user needs with engineering feasibility:
Onboarding agents had a simple, scalable way to assign tax entities across accounts.
Development could reuse an existing component, avoiding scope creep and ensuring delivery before the 2025 deadline.
Balanced business urgency with user needs: Delivered a self-service MVP that enabled internal associates to onboard customer before the 2025 tax season, avoiding delays that could have jeopardized the product launch.
Strategic design compromise: Scaled down the ideal UX to prioritize speed-to-market, leveraging existing UI patterns to reduces implementation time without blocking core functionality.
Business impact: Positioned Tango to capture an estimated $32M in net new reward value, directly tied to launching ahead of the January tax threshold.
