[kenning]

I think turbotax has a pretty phenomenal interface if you're in the bracket of people with really simple taxes. Two and three years ago, my taxes took me about an hour.

Depending on what you're looking for, you may also be interested in aping their freemium model, where the first time you use the service is free and sets you up quite well to reuse the service next year and pay $40 for one of their obnoxious services. As a customer it was quite frustrating but it succeeded in getting me to pay $40 the second year, and had I not gone far out of my way to remove the "plus" and "premium" features I would have ended up paying ~$100 the first year and $140 total the second.

The third year I switched to a competitor and got to use their service for free. In a way, using turbotax felt like a great UX mixed with a battle to read everything extremely carefully and retread my steps to avoid paying anything; to me, this is not all that morally reprehensible because it adversely affects people who don't value their money as much as their time. However it also seemed predatory in that a non-tech-savvy user such as my parents would likely be tricked into paying higher costs for essentially no added value.

[tootie]

They have a really solid approach and keeping each step really straightforward and discrete to avoid overwhelming you with too much to think about at once. It still fails really hard when you get to anything outside their flow. I had to spend time googling the awkward set of steps needed to deduct mortgage interest. Ultimately, it wasn't hard, but it wasn't at all obvious how to do it.

[beamatronic]

Um... maybe you had a strange situation but usually for mortgage interest on your home , your lender sends you a form with essentially 1 number on it and you just enter this form into TurboTax when it asks you.

[Waterluvian]

I love ufile. 10 min to file for my wife and I. One click to submit to Revenue Canada.

Its similar to what you say. A balance of minimal content and hiding unnecessary sections, but access to great detail when needed.

[aarondf]

Ha, I did my taxes today too...

I was actually thinking about how nice their webapp was to use while I was doing them, too. _Incredible_ amount of complexity to reduce to a really usable app.

[kenning]

I think an interesting thing about turbotax and ifttt is that they both were confronted with the problem of a really hard UX and they both decided that the simplest solution was just to make everything a series of modals with the absolute minimum number of decision points. Kind of like the game Reigns.