CoreLogic - Digital Tax Portal

Transforming a $130 billion process

CoreLogic, a real estate data aggregation business, generates a majority of its revenue through its property tax business. Traditionally, property tax processing and reporting relies on a combination of 50 year-old databases, VBA macros, and paper-and-pen.

While I was at CoreLogic in 2019, a team of designers and I built the digital tax portal and delivered it to local municipalities and counties from LA County to Rochester, NY. By the end of our beta period, 97% of our client decisions were being done through the portal.

It was at CoreLogic that I formed my core design beliefs: understand the business and what generates revenue, conduct lean and continuous research, and build small features, delivering and iterating often.

Image of CoreLogic Digital Tax Payment Tool

Understanding the business

I spent a lot of time during research understanding the immensely complex process of property tax collection and reporting in the United States. It is a process that sees money and data exchange with over a dozen business functions in CoreLogic alone even before considering the outside participants. One change in process (as our product was doing) impacts at multiple points in the business and our clients.

By creating storyboards and technical flows, the team and I were better able to visualize how the design and technical decisions impacted the business and what technology bottlenecked us.

Photo of a sketchbook of storyboard images on the tax process

Research-driven design, De-risked development

Working in three-week sprints, our discovery and research covered physical contextual inquiries in LA County and Bakersfield to remote user interviews in Indiana. From there, we were able to design, test, iterate and release features in two sprints. The speed and size in which we released features became the benchmark for how I knew product teams can operate and since then, I have built out multiple teams at Zoom with the same core design beliefs: understand the business and what generates revenue, conduct lean and continuous research, and build small features, delivering often and iterating regularly.