Steven Milanese

When visiting TurboTax.com, the first thing that strikes me is the overwhelming clutter of the interface. There is no clear flow to the site or distinct call to action and no call to action means no “Instant Gratification”. If I visit a site and do not find what I need in the first few seconds after landing on the page, I am off to ask Google to try again. If anything my initial instinct after visiting the website was to hit the back button. While this might qualify as a Change in Midstream, I am fairly certain it is not what they were going after in terms of their planned design. TurboTax is very fortunate in that their software delivers as advertised in a market where there is very little competition. While the application component of their digital products may be fabulous from a usability standpoint, their site fails to meet the same standard or any measurable standard of good design for that matter.

Another issue I have with the interface is despite the absence of third party advertising, the clutter gives the site a spammy feel that makes me uneasy and almost discourages my natural instinct to explore a new site. The layout is one that is almost foreboding in the sense that I get the feeling one wrong click could send me spiraling off in the wrong direction. This and the poorly defined navigation system leaves me with an interface that has no sense of Spatial Memory.

Another perspective on the lack of third party advertising is that it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the web and how it functions. Not only does the presence of recognizable brands lend credibility that can promote buyer confidence, they also serve a legitimate purpose in regards to the site’s search engine optimization, not to mention the hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue that they are missing out on. This general lack of understanding for basic web marketing principles is also demonstrated by the fact that the site offered little or no cross sale recommendations other than those offered to me once I had already committed to buying their product / service.

Another thing that surprised me when I first visited the site was the fact that they do not appear to validate their identity or domain. Best practices when dealing with financial based products is to default the page to a secure page that clearly displays an extended validation secure socket layer certificate. This sense of insecurity is only further compounded by the fact that the button clearly labeled “Chat with us” and “Call and ask us” lead me to drop down with redundant buttons that just lead me into a set of intimidating forms, almost implying that they are trying to avoid dealing with their customers at any cost. If I was not familiar with the company, these avoidance techniques might cause me to ask why they went to such efforts to avoid customer interaction.

Poor designs like these are actually fairly typical of larger corporations who more often than not tend to employ people with big portfolios rather than those with good ones. The stale cluttered design is indicative of a designer who came up in a web 1.0 world. This no doubt is someone who still believes that ASP and .NET have a place in development aside from one’s trash basket.