Overview
Leveraging your tax situation to make upsells feel helpful—not pushy.
McAfee's VPN is one of many security tools, often bundled in protection plans. Over time, the tool had fallen behind as updates rolled out to newer products, and was not being maintained by a dedicated team.
I assisted with early research, feature planning, contributing new components to our design system, collaborating with inside and outside stakeholders, and built functioning prototypes and demos for leadership shareouts.
Timeline
Nov—Jan 2024
Device
Mobile
Desktop
Credits
Susanna Huang
Nina Wang
Jeffrey Jose
Jen Barrell
PROBLEM
Finally, an upgrade that's actually worth it!
Too bad nobody knew what we were selling.
Upsells were old, confusing, and underperforming
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PROBLEM
We proposed using info from last year to personalize the experience, we don't only know taxes, we understand your concerns.
Users needed to know what "help" meant for their taxes.
What is help? Is it somebody doing your taxes for you, is it describing things you can Google or is it an AI chatbot to answer vague questions? Since taxes are vague and is unique to every individuals situation, customers often asked "what exactly am I getting help with?". Often feeling that whoever would help them won't be useful because they won't understand their unique situation.
Additionally, they thought it was help from an AI, and would go to those assistants on their own. They made assumptions.
"Get help with your taxes from our team of experts"
Research
I tested 6 layouts guided by their own principles to nudge decisions. I looked for-
30 sessions later, we had 2 layouts that performed, but mixed feelings deciding which option to move forward with.
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Exploration 1:
Emphasis
AI cards
Equal weight
What was the deciding factor (price) and use that to transition into how we communicate discounts on upsells (this was a content struggle we faced)
Call out how we made the offerings more obvious with imagery and content strategy.
TurboTax has over 35 different promotion types. How do we handle competing promotions, how it pulls, how we visualize it. Turns out price was the biggest motivator
From
"Get help with your taxes from our team of experts"
To
Get help with your investments from our team of experts"
Insight 01
Price was the deciding factor when considering a purchase.
Insight 02
People only explored benefits if they're comfortable with the cost.
Result
Based on our findings, we altered the designs to be focused on comparing prices to make 1 option feel less overwhelming, which let's them read the benefits, which helps make an informed decision.
We saw this as an opportunity to include a new service that was in early-development for months into this project. This added pressure, people and scope- but had potential for a bigger pay-off
Explorations
With these insights, I altered the 1-card design to account for price conscious users
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CHALLENGES
Training the models proved to be too time-consuming, so we had to pause and pivot.
We had a hard deadline for the start of tax-season
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1
Not enough time to train a model on 16 dynamic components.
2
Without training recommendations aren't consistently accurate.
3
Risk of page lag and break during peak filing season.
Final designs
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Final designs
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What's a VPN?
VPNs mask your location, and keep online activities private
A VPN (Virtual Private Network) takes your internet request, scrambles it into an encrypted code, and sends it through a private "tunnel" to a remote server.
Without a VPN on an unsafe network, like public Wi-Fi at a cafe or airport, you're broadcasting your online activities, allowing anyone else on it intercept things like login credentials, credit card numbers, or private messages.
Lack of product education
We explain what a VPN does only before purchase. After that, it's unclear how to select a server, what to do after turning it on and when you should turn it off.
How do I troubleshoot?
Your connection could be blocked for many reasons, and when coming back to the app, your only option is to turn it off and on again.
Hidden features
Advanced customization options are hidden several layers deep in settings.
Poor visual feedback
When turned on, there's no visual change to the browsing experience, which makes it feel like you're no safer than you were without it.
Reflection
Despite the internal hype, priorities changed and the revamp was shelved.
In my research, ETC Missing parts, hidden features and an oversimplified UI that killed engagement that all contributed to the product failure
Focus on what really matters to users
No matter how well we convey the features, the images we use or the hierachy of the product, in the end the biggest motivator for purchases was price. We spent too long trying to avoid showing less attractive prices but in the end when you make that info the most accessible, it drove people to look at why there was a price difference. It wasn't an obsticle for
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If I find myself needing to align a team on layout and abstract concepts, I feel confident that I can use sketch workshops now confident in sketching to rapid-fire ideas and align stakeholders from other teams.
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I recognize that designing to earn trust is a slow process and cannot be tracked via a single metric but rather by a combination of design empathy and user vulnerability.
Up next
Teaching Slack your work lingo
© 2025 Clayton Harding
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