LumaTax

The brief

LumaTax was a ten-person FinTech startup whose customers were sales-and-use tax accountants at large and midsize accounting firms. I was the first UX hire. Three jobs from day one.

• Introduce design discipline to the company
• Evolve the product's usability
• Own brand and marketing design

But first I had to learn everything about sales tax compliance.

Teaching UX from day one

At a ten-person startup, every UX decision sat next to product, engineering, marketing, and sales. They all needed a shared vocabulary for what design was about to become at LumaTax.

Within a week of joining, I prepared an hour-long introduction to Design Thinking (anchored on Nielsen Norman Group materials) and walked the entire company through Personas, Empathy Maps, Journey Maps, Prototyping, and Usability Testing. Attendees left understanding what UX adds and how to participate. The slides became reference material for new hires.

Discovery: personas

Understanding our customers came first. I gathered subject-matter experts, product managers, and our CEO (a former Senior Tax Auditor for the State of California) and led a discovery session about our users.

The research produced three personas, which became the touchstone we returned to on every project. We validated each persona with real users in 1-on-1 interviews.

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Framing: journey mapping

I ran the team through several journey maps to get a shared picture of how users moved through our complex workflows. The most robust was a dual-persona map of Aaron the accountant and Cathy his client, both moving through the same workflow. Completing a client profile.

The map exposed two specific failures driving the rebuild. Accountants weren't sending the Client Connect link out. And when they did, they were filling profiles in for their clients instead of inviting collaboration. It became the brief for Client Connect.

11 phases · Two personas · 80+ actions · Sentiment tracked · 30 opportunities

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I sorted "How might we..." opportunities by user value and implementation complexity. Roughly 30 of them. The 10 high-value, low-complexity items became the wireframe target for the next sprint. Wizard-style profile entry, "Need Clarity" comment threads, real-time progress for both parties, automated email CTAs. They moved through wireframes, prototypes, and usability before any pixel shipped. Two success metrics were locked before any design started. More completed profiles, more client participation in completing them.

Ideation: wireframes

Building on the journey-mapping output, I produced a series of detailed black-and-white wireframes in Figma, intentionally stripped of visual design or final copy. The goal was to keep the team's attention on user goals and information weighting, not branding or wordsmithing.

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Interaction design: prototyping

I converted the wireframes into clickable Figma prototypes (navigation, hover states, animations, tooltips, all of it), primarily for usability sessions, but also for communicating concepts to the rest of the team.

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Validate: usability studies

Across my career I've organized and facilitated more than a hundred usability sessions. The cadence at LumaTax produced 12+ studies with tax filers and accountants, and the rhythm went like this.

• Recruit eight participants for a target of five (attrition is real).
• Schedule via HubSpot. Track in a spreadsheet so no one gets double-booked.
• Generate explicit assumptions to validate, ranging from "users find this control" to "users understand this messaging."
• Write a session script that surfaces each assumption without bias.
• Run 1-on-1s on Zoom with an internal observer backchannel for follow-up questions.
• Synthesize after each session (validated, invalidated, or unvalidated).
• Roll the findings into a summary. Validated assumptions go to engineering. Invalidated ones go back to UX. Unvalidated ones go into the next study.

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Session script. Assumptions to validate, scripted prompts to surface them without bias.

This loop fed every onboarding redesign we ran, including the Client Connect rebuild.

Visual design and design system

Once an assumption was validated, the wireframes received a final visual layer. Over time that layer became faster to apply because of the design systems I maintained. Three of them. Spectra for the product, one for wireframes, one for marketing.

Each component was built with strict attention to detail (button shape, hover, down state, animation) and shipped with the variations the team would actually need. The systems were published as Figma libraries and linked into every product file, so a global change propagated across the product on contact.

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The same screen as the wireframe above, with the Spectra visual layer applied.

Marketing website and materials

In my first months at LumaTax I redesigned our marketing website. The site I'd inherited wasn't user-friendly or visually appealing, and rewriting it forced me to learn sales-and-use tax fast. If I could help the site sell our product, I'd understand the product itself.

I treated the site like any UX project (personas, responsive wireframes, prototypes, visual design) and co-produced the animated explainer video that anchored the homepage. After launch, the visual language carried over into every other marketing asset the company shipped.

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What happened next

In 2023 LumaTax was acquired by Taxually, a 150-person tax compliance company operating across Europe. The design practice I'd built for ten people now belonged to an organization fifteen times that size.

That stretch produced the Stripe integration that made the combined company Stripe's official tax filing partner, featured on the main stage at Stripe Sessions 2025.