Hello Archit,
Fellow Indian Geek here. I must say good job on the site, you have managed to make something that is usable. Here is some of my suggestions:<p>1) I think you need to get a fancy logo. current one is too plain according to me.<p>2) You are asking customers some sensitive & yet I do not see "Privacy Policy" which is what stopped me from entering PAN No right at first step1. If its already there, highlight it<p>3) A Strong TOS would indemnify from liability. so, You should add a TOS & make customers agree to it.<p>4) Any Particular reason Pricing is hidden from Homepage?<p>5) In welcome email that you send. add few details like name, userid etc. It makes it more original & less fake.<p>6) I understand you want a "Lean UI" but I think more naked than Lean. so spice it up a bit - add some fancy transitions, better typography(Try webfonts) etc.<p>7) For entering Date,javascript validation message says: "Please enter date of birth in format: 25/10/1984". isn't giving specific format DD/MM/YYY more accurate. Further, Any reason you are not using Date Picker?<p>8) Make Login Button more prominent. so user won't try to register again. Your current homepage encourages to everybody to click on that big orange button which is not something you want your existing users should be doing.<p>9) Taxes aren't something that most people understand. so even after such Intutive UI, people will have questions. so highlight your support methods available(Phone, email etc).<p>10) Last & most important: Don't just be a pretty interface to official Website. You never know when incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in becomes irctc.co.in. That's too risky business model. Try to add more value to service.<p>Hope it helps
While it is good that you kept the UI very lean, you would probably benefit from having a UI/UX guy help you with making the app feel a bit more 'dressed up'. Currently this looks like a developer designed it (I should know, I suffer from the same problem).<p>Also, having worked on pretty much the exact same product for the French market, one thing I remember people liked was help sections. By that, I mean big long blobs of text that explain the law in detail. On each form page you could display the relevant explainations, and then compile that into a searchable index, and even use that on dedicated pages for SEO purposes.<p>Oh and maybe you wanna say 'the easy way [to do your taxes]', rather than 'an easy way'.
Check out this demo video: <a href="http://cleartax.in/meta/demo" rel="nofollow">http://cleartax.in/meta/demo</a><p>I wish taxes in the US were this simple. I've been thinking for a long time that some good UI/UX designers should be in charge of redoing the US tax code and forms. If it's too complicated to be usable/understandable by a person without special training, then it shouldn't go in the tax code.
I used this to file my wife's tax return the other day. The experience was quite good (going by Indian standards). Few things based on my experience.<p>1) There should be a flowchart explaining the steps. Something like Enter information -> Generate ITR V -> Send it to CPC. I was lost when I was asked to post something somewhere and had to look up the process of e-filing on the net.<p>2) While entering information each text box/textarea has a information on the relevant field of Form 16. That should link to a pic to sample Form 16 highlighting the field. Somethings were ambiguous.<p>3) More information on what types of Tax Filings are covered. I had to ask you guys to ask about self employed tax filing (and you guys responded very fast, which was great) because I didn't find a FAQ.<p>4) Information on when do you have to pay and how much. I was never asked for any payment. Which is good, but I'm still kinda confused how that happened. :)<p>5) The step where it was submitting the information to the income tax website kept timing out. I guess it was maybe because the endpoint was not responding. I tried it the next day during working hours and it went through. You can maybe automate this by giving users an option to automatically retry.<p>Few questions I had after using it was.<p>1) Will you guys add support for digital signatures?
2) Will you also allow someone to apply for a digital signature and get it?
3) What is your business model? Do you charge a fee for each filing?<p>Overall I'd give you a rating of 4 (on a scale of 5). I wish there were more such utility services in India.
Just curious: how much would I have to pay to get cleartax pro?<p>Also, you might want to fix the Mr Bose example: "ClearTax (an Income Tax website) rode to his resuce". I'm not entirely sure that I consider the story to be a positive endorsement, by the way :) It seems too contrived to be true.<p>Edit: I found out there's a demo video from HN. You might want to make that link a tiny bit more prominent. I love the video, by the way.
I will give you 3 quick points :
1) target NRIs and their tax questions. You will not find any more eager paying customers than NRIs who can get help with their taxes and also help in filing .
Search the forums and you will will hundreds of queries and questions . Leverage those to come with a custom product offering for them
2) Get some Branding : you will need some solid reputation or word of mouth for people to come to you. Explore tie ups.
3) Get some white hackers to test your site. There is nothing more important than convincing people that they can trust you with important financial data.
Have your sites "worked on" thoroughly. :-)<p>I can give more but not for free ;-)<p>Pat
apinkelefant@gmail.com
Two technical things if you are really serious. Localization. Make sure you can support the 22 official languages. And you need a mobile strategy. Mos of your potential users are going to come from. When you consider that brazil had more notebook shipments than India though the population is 1/5th. By my estimation, in India the mobile phone us the Internet.
Wish I have seen this last week :).
Had to pay 250 bucks to a CA. I tried filing through the income tax website before that.. it looked okay, but you have to jump through a lot of hoops before getting it right. Also, it looked too flaky so didn't dare to go with e-filing..
Honestly, no one pays taxes in India. Your product has no market. I can speak at length about this, but it's part of the reason real estate values in India increase by 30% year over year. Everyone hides their black money in real estate investments.
I like what you are doing here, but you need to be upfront with the pricing before making a user sign up. Having to give up some personal information before even knowing what the product will cost me gives me a negative feeling.
Just a minor note on English: in "Keep a safe electronic copy of your taxrecords with us" <i>tax</i> and <i>records</i> should be two separate words, not one.