Dext MTD Dashboard: Designing for the Biggest Change in UK Tax Compliance
Leading the end-to-end design of a new practice-level Making Tax Digital dashboard within Dext Solo.
- Role
- Senior Product Designer
- Period
- 4 months
- READ TIME
- 11 min
- 65%
- First-month adoption among existing Dext Solo users
- 42,153
- Clients managed through the dashboard
- 4
- Quarterly submissions per client
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax (MTD IT) represents one of the biggest changes to UK personal tax compliance in decades. It would change how sole traders and landlords keep records and report to HMRC. For accountants, it would turn one annual submission per client into four quarterly submissions per client.
For accountants and practices with hundreds or even thousands of clients, they needed to action at-risk clients and confidently prioritise their workload to take the right next step.
- —The increase in submissions brought new and multiplying sources of risk.
- —We were solving a problem users had not experienced.
- —I was designing to a strict product release deadline driven by the governmental policy.
- —We were designing an addition to an existing platform, which meant adhering to platform constraints.
You've read the challenge.
Now experience the pressure.
Step into a simplified practice view and decide which clients are ready to submit and which need attention.
This takes around 30 seconds.
From early conversations I had with the Product Manager, it became apparent that the initial release's primary commercial objective would be to increase Net Revenue Retention of Dext customers, making Dext Solo existing accountants’ preferred MTD compliance solution.
“How can we help accountants submit quarterly tax returns?”
“How do we help practices see their workload, spot clients at risk, and decide what to tackle next?”
The slight reframing realigned the direction of the project. We focused on helping practices understand their overall compliance position across all clients, and direct them on what to do next rather than optimising individual submission tasks. This would enable them to identify risks earlier and confidently prioritise work across their client portfolio.
I did a competitive analysis to discover opportunities.
I analysed accounting platforms and compliance products to understand how similar problems were being solved. I used a combination of AI research and competitive analysis. Some of the competitors I reviewed were Xero, FreeAgent, and QuickBooks. Outside of direct competitors, I also reviewed broader dashboard SaaS product patterns.
I noticed that none of the competitors quickly informed users of how much was in their workload. My concern was that if an accountant could not estimate their workload, they would end up in a situation where they would not complete their work by the quarterly deadline or, even worse, rush and submit it with errors. I used this finding to explore the information hierarchy.
Our dashboard needed to answer three questions.
Our goal became helping accountants answer three simple questions within seconds instead of displaying as much information as possible.
How many clients require attention?
Which clients are most at risk?
What should accountants do next?
Throughout the project, reducing cognitive load became a guiding principle, ensuring every component earned its place without contributing to increased complexity and slower decision-making.
Building shared ownership
With the goal and overall direction agreed, I facilitated a workshop to create a shared understanding of the problem space. I brought together the cross-functional team of Product, Engineering and domain experts before moving into design.
We focused on questions like
- —What does success look like for accounting practices managing hundreds or thousands of clients?
- —Where are users most likely to make mistakes?
From this, the team had a shared understanding of success.
Understanding the mental model of accountants
Before jumping into designing interfaces, I wanted to understand how accountants think, not just what they do, especially when viewing hundreds of clients. By understanding this and incorporating it into the product, the dashboard would feel like an intuitive experience.
Accountants think about multiple client types at a time
Separate user interviews with accountants gave us insight into their workflow. Accountants switch between reviewing their workload, identifying high-risk clients and drilling into individual cases that constantly require attention. The dashboard needed to support all of these switches in workflow without unnecessary complexity.
Exploring the overdue client flow
The next thing to do was explore user flows. Understanding the accountant's mental model helped me view the product from their perspective. The flow that I wanted to explore the most was the overdue client flow, as this was the flow that would be the highest risk and easiest to make human errors on.
Turning strategy into MVP
The information hierarchy and customer journeys were now agreed upon, so I turned my attention to wireframes. This part of the process was not about polished designs but early concepts. I explored two ways of representing the task priority, how accountants could move through the product and how information could support quick decision-making.
Wireframing in low fidelity encouraged Product and Engineering to critique workflows rather than aesthetics, leading to better conversations around usability and behaviour.
Better decisions through constraints
As the MTD Dashboard was an addition to the Dext Solo product, designs had to adhere to the technical constraints of Dext Solo. This meant that a close working relationship between Design and Engineering was critical to succeed.
Engineering informed me of the dependency cost of the Q1–Q4 quarter indicators, so together we chose to go with the badges. This way we retained the user benefit and avoided the extra implementation cost.
Another section of the design where this was important was the nested-row interaction patterns. Building them would significantly increase development time and delay delivery. We discussed which interaction patterns genuinely reduced cognitive effort and deserved investment and which added complexity without improving decision-making.
Through these conversations, engineering changed from reviewers to design partners.
Deprioritising data tiles
One of the biggest challenges in this project was ensuring that the experience was always considered. It was my responsibility to advocate for it in the prioritisation of the scope and release. This became crucial when discussing the data tiles at the top of the MTD Dashboard design. I designed them to help accountants with a quick overview of their work and an indication of what to action. The engineers and Product Manager wanted to drop them from the design as they believed it would take too much effort to build and could potentially delay the release.
User testing with accountants
As users had not yet tangibly experienced the effect of MTD on their workload, validating assumptions with real users was even more important. It would also give me a chance to validate the importance of the data tiles in the design. I organised remote guerrilla tests with 6 accountants. In each of the six user tests, I presented both prototypes I had quickly spun up with Claude Code: one with the data tiles and one without. The user tests allowed us to understand how accountants interpreted the dashboard and whether the information hierarchy supported their natural workflows. It also allowed me to prove the importance of the data tiles.
Four themes appeared in every session
Accountants expected an overview first
Participants instinctively searched for a high-level summary before individual client detail. When shown the dashboard without data tiles, all six participants asked for them. This provided direct evidence for the design decision that had faced the most internal debate.
Users prioritised exceptions over completion
Participants cared far more about identifying clients at risk than reviewing clients already progressing. This shifted us from progress reporting towards actionable exceptions.
Simplicity increased confidence
Participants decided faster and more confidently with fewer competing visual elements. This validated the choice to reduce density rather than add functionality.
Evidence changed the conversation
Up until this point, personal opinions had driven debates, but now they were grounded in observable behaviour, making prioritisation across Product, Engineering and Design easier.
Compromises between immediate delivery and long-term quality product experience
Throughout the project, there was a continuous tension between meeting the HMRC deadline and releasing a product that could create experience and design debt, as well as wider usability problems, down the line. The business understandably wanted to release quickly, but I had to weigh up the cost to the experience.
As a result of this the Product Manager wanted us to drop the data tiles even though they addressed a valid need for the user. In the user testing, participants instinctively reached for the compliance overview. I used the research evidence to advocate for a representation of task overview. Working with the developers and Product Manager, we came up with a design pattern that already existed in the code base and solved the user needs.
As a result of the user testing I also proposed a V1 and V2 approach.
Success was not releasing everything in V1
Version 1 was the smallest set of functionality that would help accountants and practices confidently adopt the new workflows. This would enable them to be HMRC compliant.
Long-term experience improvements
Version 2 was planned to introduce functionality that would improve the efficiency of completing tasks, for example, by having nested rows with the badges we would reduce cognitive load for the user making it easier to see what clients needed more attention.
1st month adoption
The launch gave us the first chance to see how effective our design was. Accounting practices began using the dashboard to manage real MTD obligations at scale.
- 65%
- First-month adoption among existing Dext Solo users
- 42,153
- Clients managed through the dashboard
Customer Success started using the Dext Solo MTD Dashboard to market the Dext product as a whole to accountants in webinars and incorporated it into their onboarding conversations, which helped firms understand how to manage quarterly compliance using Dext. It was also used in Sales demonstrations and presented at Accountex, evidencing that Dext was ready for the regulatory change ahead.
Aligning people around the right problem is great product design
Success depended on combining user research, domain expertise, strategic thinking and close collaboration to anticipate problems before customers experienced them. Making Tax Digital made me think beyond interface design because the future workflow didn't yet exist. The thing within this piece of work that I am most proud of is using Design to create a shared understanding of the problem across Product, Engineering and the wider business.
Three important learnings stand out from this project.
1) Evidence transforms stakeholder conversations from subjective opinion into evidence-based decision-making.
2) In products where error carries real consequences, prioritise error reduction over elegance.
3) Alignment is often more valuable than speed.
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