IRS2Go
Keeping tax tasks inside the IRS’s official app.
An official app that kept sending people elsewhere
IRS2Go is the IRS’s official mobile app, but almost every task sent people out to a website. Our team redesigned it to keep refund checks, payments and tax help inside the app, and raised its usability score from 31.3 to 78.25.
Five screens, almost nothing built in
People had to re-enter their SSN and tax year on every visit, and most buttons opened irs.gov. Reviews were blunt: the app had a 2.8 rating on the App Store.
- Redirects. Nearly every task left the app for the IRS website.
- Re-entering. Nothing was saved, so every visit started from scratch.
- No onboarding. Nobody knew what the app could actually do.
App Store, Play Store and Quora reviews pointed at the same frustrations.
From interviews to a tested prototype
We started by talking to people, not by redrawing screens.
- 1InterviewsThree participants, ages 20–40, walked us through filing their taxes.
- 2Task analysisWe mapped refund status and payments step by step, every redirect included.
- 3RedesignKept every key task in the app, with saved inputs and clearer screens.
- 4Usability testing11 participants, ages 16–65, thinking aloud through three tasks.
Bringing everything in-app
The core decision was simple: stop redirecting people.
Refund status, before and after
Drag the slider to compare the old form with the redesign.
Fig. Refund status — original app (left) and redesign (right).
Payments without leaving the app
Hover the numbers to see how payments now work.
Both ways to pay sit in one place, with a clear way out for anyone who can’t pay yet.
Testing with 11 real users
We tested the old app and the new prototype with 11 participants, ages 16 to 65. They thought aloud through three tasks, then rated usability on the standard 10-question scale. What we saw changed real screens.
A clickable prototype
The working Figma prototype we tested with: all four tabs, onboarding, the refund form, payment processor selection and the confirmation modal.
Open the prototype ↗Usability from 31.3 to 78.25
The old app scored 31.3. Our redesign hit 78.25. We had set 75 as the target — the team cleared it.
What I learned
The biggest insight wasn’t about UI patterns — it was about trust. Every time the app sent users to an external site, it was silently saying “we can’t handle this.” Bringing those flows in-house, adding a confirmation step before payments, reducing how much users had to remember — these weren’t big features, but they changed how people felt about the product entirely.
If we continued, the next focus would be the sign-up flow (our biggest remaining drop-off point) and inline field validation — so users know something’s wrong before they hit submit.
