Skatteguiden

Overview

Skatteguiden helps Danes check they're paying the right tax. As product manager and one of the designers on the project, I owned the problem framing, hypothesis, and scope, shaped the redesign together with our dedicated product designer, and ran it as an A/B test that engineering built and shipped. Cutting the dashboard's clutter and turning it into a single, tax-state-aware call to action drove measurable gains in both engagement and paid conversion.

Problem

The dashboard was the first thing every logged-in user saw, and it tried to say everything at once:

• Two promo banners, a row of tax-tracking cards, an early tax-estimate card, and an income chart
• Every block the same size and weight, so nothing read as the priority
• The two features that drive the business were buried in the grid at the same prominence as everything else: the income overview, where users see their registered income, and the tax check, which flags whether their taxes are set up correctly
• The tax check is what converts free users to paid membership, so burying it cost real revenue

No hierarchy means no call to action. When everything is equally important, nothing is.

My Role

I worked as product manager and designer on a small team with a dedicated product designer and engineers. I owned the problem framing, hypothesis, scope, and project structure, and ran discovery together with our designer - user research, survey design, response review, and whiteboard ideation. On the design side I built the early wireframes and mockups and contributed to the final screens, which our designer and I handed off to engineering to build and ship.

Decisions

01

Cut about half the content

• The problem wasn't ugly components, it was too many of them shouting at the same volume
• We kept the patterns users already knew, removed roughly half the blocks, and refreshed the UI to feel current
• Less to parse means the eye can find the thing that matters

02

One state-driven hero, action-first

• We moved the skattemeter (a dial: paying too little, about right, or too much) to the top as the single focal point
• The old dashboard buried it in a Track card and required a tap to see what to do; the new hero states the exact next action inline - one fewer tap
• The hero isn't fixed. It reads the user's real tax state - at risk, overpaying, or on track - and changes the headline and button to match. Same slot, different meaning per user.

The call to action changes label and meaning by the user's actual tax situation. The "what do I do now" is answered before they ask.

Before committing to the hero, we put it in front of real users:

• Skatteguiden runs a user panel - roughly 500 people who opted in to test new features and give feedback
• Using Lyssna, we ran quick surveys on clickable prototypes: did people understand what the tax meter was telling them? was it clear what to do next?
• The fast turnaround let us refine the design on real comprehension instead of internal opinion

The panel is a biased sample - opted-in, already-happy users - so we treated it as a comprehension check, not proof of demand. For "do people understand this and know what to do next," it was exactly the right signal.

03

Personalize by membership tier

• Tier determines feature access, so it also determines what's worth showing
• Freemium sees the essentials; Standard adds an SU card; Plus gets the full set including Topskat
• Nobody sees a locked feature dressed up as an upsell in the main flow - the screen shows what's actually relevant to you

04

A darker call to action for freemium

• Members get the standard purple action button; freemium users get a darker, upsell-flavored one that leads into the paid upgrade flow
• The same slot does double duty - a next action for members, a conversion entry point for free users - with no separate "upgrade" block cluttering the screen

05

Measuring it when the tooling fought back

• PostHog was mid-implementation and its data wasn't yet trustworthy
• Rather than fly blind, we ran the redesign as an A/B test, and I manually exported PostHog feature flags into Braze to measure against a clean source
• Not elegant, but the 100% rollout decision was backed by real numbers, not a hunch

PostHog feature flags

assigned the A/B groups

manual export →

Braze

clean engagement + sales tracking

Outcome

The new dashboard won the A/B test and rolled out to 100% of users. Engagement with the core features rose and paid conversion climbed:

• +14% more users reached the income overview, the redesign's biggest lift
• More members also opened the tax check, though the number who actually ran one held flat

On the free side, where the business case lives:

The redesign drove its biggest lift in users reaching the income overview. More members opened the tax check thanks to its new prominence, but the number who actually ran one held flat - so I read the extra opens as curiosity, not new intent.

Lessons learned

• Push for trustworthy analytics before shipping, not after. The manual Braze export got us a decision, but a clean setup would have let me segment by tier and tax state and learn far more from a redesign this central.
• Hierarchy is a feature. The biggest win came not from new functionality but from removing content and making one action obvious.
• One slot can serve two audiences. The tier-aware hero and the freemium button color let a single component drive both engagement and conversion without adding clutter.