The U.S. Digital Service (USDS) partnered with the IRS to launch the new Direct File Pilot Program, which USDS Administrator Mina Hsiang said on Wednesday is an “incredibly exciting” customer experience (CX) achievement.
Direct File is an online tool that allows taxpayers with simple tax situations in 12 states to file their taxes directly with the IRS. Currently, Hsiang said there are about 20 million people who are eligible to file using this application.
“I think that’s one of the first things: start small,” Hsiang said when discussing the success of the program at the Government Innovation, Strategy, and Technology (GIST) Conference in Washington, D.C. on April 10.
“It can be daunting and overwhelming,” she added. “I know many of you work on programs that have huge distribution and there is this expectation that you’re going to do a ‘Big Bang’ launch that will apply for every single human in America on day one, and that’s just not realistic. That’s not how any services or products get rolled out.”
Hsiang explained that when you’re moving paper from pile to pile, people can understand what’s possible and have realistic expectations of how fast the paper can be moved. Yet, when it comes to technology, she said non-technical people don’t have intuition about what’s possible and “assume magic” at a large scale.
“The same is true in technology, and part of it has been having that dialogue and working with agencies and policymakers to say, ‘This will go better if we do not try and solve for every single use case. If we decide that we’re going to start small,’” Hsiang said.
The USDS chief said that the second thing her agency did when developing Direct File was incorporate user feedback and research from “day one.” Additionally, she said USDS has a whole team of researchers who worked with lawyers to ensure the tool was legally compliant but didn’t “make it a page of legalese because we know … that’s not comprehensible to a normal person.”
In addition to the IRS, Hsiang said USDS also worked closely with the General Services Administration’s 18F office and multiple contractors to produce the Direct File pilot.
“This has been a huge collaborative team effort, and that’s the other sort of key to really making these operations run,” she said. “We all work for different vendors and different sub-teams within an agency, but the more that we can operate as one team, the more our product will look like a single team with a unified vision built in, which is important.”
