Spruce in DIY

Product design, Marketing as UX

Using research and data to strategically integrate Spruce offers into the H&R Block DIY tax product, exceeding OKRs by 56% and championing customer centricity as a way to achieve business outcomes.

How might we offer Spruce in H&R Block Online to reach business goals without frustrating users?

Senior Leadership at H&R Block set an ambitious business goal for the 2024 tax season: to grow 50,000 new Spruce accounts by leveraging the popular H&R Block online tax filing product (DIY). The challenge lay in integrating offers for Spruce—H&R Block's financial product—into the user experience without it feeling like a hard sell or an intrusive ad. To achieve this, we hypothesized that strategically placed offers for Spruce, presented somewhere permanent on the screen as well as throughout the DIY product, would encourage users to sign up at higher rates, helping the business meet its goal.

Prior year designs were often criticized or dismissed for being “too ad-like.” Users who had seen the ads could not articulate what Spruce was or the benefits it offered. They were placed generically throughout the product.

The problem

Having recently transitioned from Spruce team to the DIY team, I was uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between the two products. With experience redesigning various facets of both products, I led the effort to use the existing research insights gathered by the Spruce Research team to craft compelling and data-driven offers. I collaborated closely with research, content, and product to ensure that our design solutions would get us across the finish line.

One of the major frustrations the Spruce team had with marketing in other channels was that, despite the wealth of data on why users were drawn to Spruce, most offers were too generic and missed the mark. I helped my product manager review this data and align on a path forward—one based on cold, hard data. In addition, the DIY team had established that one of our biggest hurdles would be client aversion to anything that felt like an ad or promotion while filing. The challenge was clear: we had to integrate Spruce without making it feel promotional, while also addressing common user pain points like understanding Spruce's features and defining mobile banking.

Several key pain points emerged:

  • Ad Aversion: Users were highly dismissive of anything that felt like an advertisement, typically clicking to close or dismiss anything perceived as an upsell before even glancing at it.

  • Lack of Understanding: Users were unsure about what Spruce was, whether it was a bank or just an app, and why they would need another account.

  • Different Needs: Users engaged with Spruce for different reasons—some self-employed individuals used it to manage taxes and expenses, while others, like single mothers, saw value in the early refund feature to pay bills. We needed to address these diverse use cases without overwhelming users.

My approach

We identified key points in the tax-filing journey where presenting Spruce would feel natural and not disruptive.

Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, we designed customized offers based on the user's tax filing SKU. For example, users filing a simple return saw offers that highlighted Spruce’s early refund feature, while self-employed users received messages about managing gig income with Spruce's saving goals.

We introduced a persistent yet subtle offer in the left navigation pane. This ensured that users could access Spruce information throughout the filing process without it feeling intrusive. Additionally, we placed the most prominent offers right before users chose how to receive their tax refund or pay any balances. This allowed us to meet them with relevant information exactly when they were thinking about financial products.

We created interactive prototypes of our designs and tested them in moderated tests on UserTesting.com. The goal was to ensure the messaging felt natural and engaging. During testing, we paid particular attention to user reactions to the layout and content to ensure it felt informational rather than ad-like. From the results, we were reaffirmed that our placements were working well. We were also able to update the offers to highlight more relevant features and add clarity, ensuring Spruce was communicated clearly to be a helpful, free tool rather than yet another paid upsell in the DIY product.

This is the offer all users would see after clicking the offer in the left nav at any point in the tax experience.

This is the generic offer users would see if they had not signed a legal consent at the beginning of the tax experience allowing us to market offers specifically to their tax situation.

This is the offer users would see in the Free product if they were receiving a refund.

This is the offer users in a Free or Deluxe product would see if they owed a balance due.

This is the offer Premium and Self Employed users would see regardless of a refund or balance due.

The final designs successfully balanced the business desire to promote Spruce with users' need for a smooth, uninterrupted tax-filing experience. The offers were visually cohesive with the rest of the DIY tax product, blending seamlessly into the user interface. Personalized messages resonated well with the audience, addressing their specific needs while reinforcing the key benefits of Spruce. The left-pane offer was subtle yet accessible, ensuring that users who wanted more information could easily find it without feeling overwhelmed.

Results

Our designs resulted in DIY achieving 156% of its 50K sign up goal. Here are some of our other achievments:

Most sign ups in a single day

6,114

April 15, 2024

Biggest YoY change

615%

April 15, 2024

Biggest delta vs. SRP

762%

January 4, 2024

The results exceeded expectations. We hit our 50,000 Spruce sign-up goal more than two months ahead of schedule, achieving it by February 14, well before the April 15 deadline. By the end of the tax season, the total number of sign-ups reached 78,209—a 122.5% increase over the previous year. Additionally, the majority of Spruce sign-ups (54.97%) during the tax season came directly from the DIY product.

From this project, I learned the importance of understanding user context and timing when presenting product offers. We collaborated closely and developed new working strategies with our legal team to allow us to market the most important messages while limiting the risk to the company. I also felt like this project specifically was a huge win in demonstrating to upper management the critical need to balance business goals with a user-centered design approach. Ultimately, the Spruce in DIY offers were wildly successful, both setting Spruce up for another great year and positioning DIY as a team to watch for customer-centric problem solving.

Team

Haley Mitchell
Designer

Sreerekha Ramachandran
Product Manager

Shayla Gordon
Content Designer

Kate Michel
UX Researcher

my contributions

  • Visual design for all offers

  • Partner sourcing: brought on content and research partners

  • Collaborated with product on placements