Modernising OnlinePajak’s platform to help businesses complete tax workflows faster.

Defined the design strategy, roadmap and metrics

Rebuilding a whole platform takes effort from every part of a company, so the plan mattered as much as the design. We wanted to avoid dropping large changes on stakeholders all at once.

We drew up the roadmap with the CEO and the product teams. What counted was what reached customers, not how good the work looked in a prototyping tool.

Changes of this size needed measurable targets, for the design team and for the products. The timeline was tight, so we grew the team quickly and kept engineering from waiting on us.

Established the operational aspect of product design

OnlinePajak had more than 100 staff members across Indonesia, Singapore and Australia. Setting up design and research operations enabled the team to do good work at scale

At its largest the design team had 10 designers and researchers, covering both product and marketing. Every deliverable went through peer review.

We moved task management into Jira so everyone could see the state of the work. Each designer owned a single product, establishing direct accountability.

We also set up a QA process for what went live. The small details are what separate a good product from a great one.

Built the design system

We built a design system on Google’s Material UI, so the product stayed consistent as it grew.

It was built alongside the brand refresh and adopted for the product first, followed by the new marketing site and other touchpoints.

It covered every layout and feature, with each component mapped to the Vuetify library the front end was already using. We kept custom components to a minimum so delivery stayed fast and quality stayed even.

Created a unified transaction experience

The biggest change was 1-Transaction, which automates receivables, payables and compliance in one flow and connects to third-party APIs. People found it hard to use at first because it asked them to work in a new way.

So we let people carry on doing single tasks the way they always had, with the full transaction there when they wanted it.

It has two main parts. A table for managing documents and running bulk actions, and a tool for creating and editing e-documents, grouped by Transaction ID with the next action suggested from each document’s status.

Boosted user activation through data, research and content

The goal was to raise monthly active users among self-serve SMEs through better onboarding and a better experience after the redesign. The main measure was monthly active companies completing high-value tasks, with first-time active companies as the secondary.

We mapped the customer journeys to find where users stalled, talked to them about what was in their way and wrote content that helped them decide faster. We also built interactive tutorials that showed how short each task actually was.

Redefined the OnlinePajak brand

The brand refresh touched almost everything else, so it came early. The aim was to bring the identity up to date and make it work outside Indonesia.

We made a brand book showing how far the identity could stretch, then built out assets for the marketing team that the rest of the company ended up using too.

The new brand showed up first on the marketing site and in the product design system. We rebuilt the marketing site so that it matched what users saw after they logged in.

The result was a bolder identity that was easier to extend, and the whole company adopted it.

Valuable takeaways

Talk to the right customers. Work out who the real users are, speak to them and decide based on what they tell us.

Good content removes most of the friction, and it is what makes a go-to-market plan land.

Shipping new features is only half of it. Going back and improving what is already there matters just as much.

Google Analytics tracking is harder to get right than it looks. Document the tracking plan and check the implementation, or the data will mislead.

On a B2B platform, pick features that have to work on mobile. Making every data-heavy screen responsive is rarely worth it.