Reimagine Public Sector Taxation Platform
Large scale transformation in Tax & Revenue Management Space
🧭 Overview
The E-Maratax Portal is a UAE government digital taxation system designed to streamline tax filing, compliance, and financial reporting for individuals and businesses. The project focused on improving accessibility, reducing filing errors, and enabling faster decision-making through intuitive UX and automation.
Project Context
The UAE is rapidly shifting toward fully digital public services. The existing tax portal was functional but lacked usability, clarity, and consistency, resulting in low first-time completion rates. The redesign aimed to modernize the platform while ensuring compliance with federal tax regulations and accessibility standards.It is one of the largest transformation journey in the middle east region.
🎯 Objective
To redesign the E-Maratax experience to be simpler, clearer, and more efficient, enabling citizens and businesses to file taxes with confidence and minimal manual effort.
🧩 The Challenge
- Complex multi-step journeys (registration, returns, refunds and payments)
- Fragmented workflows between businesses and individuals
- High dependency on support teams due to unclear UI
- Accessibility gaps for multilingual and differently-abled users
👤 My Role
- Manage design team, strategy and execution in collaboration with partnering organization PwC & EY
- Conducting flow analysis and simplifying complex tax journeys
- Designing multilingual accessible experiences (Arabic/English)
- Creating dashboards, guided workflows, and responsive UI
- Collaborating with FTA stakeholders, product managers, and engineering
- Facilitating workshops & usability testing sessions
- Delivering prototypes, design system components
🎯 UX Goals
- Reduce cognitive load across all tax-related tasks
- Introduce modular, guided workflows for filing and registration
- Improve dashboard clarity and information hierarchy
- Build trust through transparency (statuses, tracking, notifications)
- Achieve WCAG 2.2 compliance for inclusivity
- Ensure scalability for future policy changes
🛠️ Design Execution
1. Discovery & Analysis (Process followed by partnering teams)
- Design-thinking workshops to gather insights from tax officers, business owners, and accountants.
- Conducted end-to-end journey audits for filing, registration, refunds, and compliance tasks.
- Mapped pain points including form fatigue, unclear terminology, and non-linear flows.
2. Information Architecture Rework
- Reorganized the portal into a task-based navigation model for better clarity.
- Introduced a unified dashboard displaying filing status, payments due, pending actions, and notifications.
- Reduced redundant steps and eliminated duplicated pages across workflows.
3. Guided Workflow Design
- Designed modular, step-by-step journeys for registration, filing, amendments, and refund requests.
- Added inline help, tooltips, and glossary panels to simplify complex tax terminology.
- Integrated auto-save, progress indicators, and error-prevention patterns to reduce user friction.
4. Form and Interaction Optimization
- Implemented dynamic form logic to show only relevant fields based on user input.
- Applied real-time validation to reduce submission errors.
- Added review and confirmation screens to help users verify information before submission.
5. Multilingual & Accessibility Enhancements
- Ensured complete Arabic–English parity, including mirrored UI layouts for RTL.
- Improved readability through better spacing, typography, and contrast ratios.
- Designed to meet WCAG 2.2 AA standards with proper keyboard navigation, focus states, and screen-reader support.
6. Visual & Interface Design
- Established a consistent visual hierarchy across modules and key workflows.
- Created reusable components—cards, tables, alerts, status badges—aligned with the design system.
- Designed responsive layouts optimized for tablets and mobile devices.
7. Prototyping & User Validation
- Built high-fidelity interactive prototypes in XD.
- Conducted usability testing with accountants, SMEs, and internal admin users.
- Iterated designs based on feedback on field clarity, terminology, and task completion flow.
8. Handover & Implementation Support
- Delivered detailed design specifications, screen behavior notes, and component documentation.
- Worked closely with engineering teams to clarify edge cases and logic dependencies.
- Supported QA and UAT phases to ensure accurate and high-quality implementation.
🚀 Outcome & Impact
- 30–40% reduction in time taken to file taxes
- Reduced support-ticket volume for registrations and payments
- Higher user confidence and fewer submission errors
- Improved adoption among SMEs and first-time users
- Stronger accessibility and inclusivity across the platform
💬 Learnings
- Government services need clarity over creativity
- Multilingual design must consider context, structure, and layout—not just translation
- Status visibility improves trust and user confidence
- Early alignment with policy and compliance teams reduces rework
🧪 Workshop
Conducted Beta Testing Workshop with guest user to test the platform before public launch related to:
- UX workflows and dashboards
- Error-handling logic
- Multilingual design
Beta Testing Workshop - July 2022
📢 Public Launch
The redesigned portal was launched nationwide on 5th December 2022 by the UAE Federal Tax Authority and was well-received for its clarity, accessibility, and faster tax submission experience.