E@syFile™ Employer (called e@syFile in this document) is an application released in 2008 to allow corporate South Africa to submit their bi-annual PAYE reconciliations. It seamlessly imports data from all payroll software, resulting in 99% of all certificates included in EMP501 declarations being submitted via e-File. e@syFile is thus key to the automation of the annual personal income tax process and is critical in ensuring the integrity of the data received, which includes both financial and demographic data. The system plays a key role in assisting SARS to project PAYE revenue. The PAYE recon files received are also useful in assisting SARS in risk assessment and audit support.

e@syFile is a very stable product that can handle single submissions of up to 500 000 certificates. It is therefore critical that we maintain this capability and stability while also improving the system to meet technological and business requirements. The validation engine in e@syFile is the most complex component. This engine is minimally impacted in the transformation of e@syFile, resulting in important risk management and reduced business impact.

This particular design was a lot of fun because I learned a lot about SARS, the EMP501 pre-population process, and how important it is for SARS to project PAYE revenue. With lots of questions from start to finish, I acted as the point of contact for the SARS team, which knew what they wanted and how they wanted it, not to mention how they kept emphasizing their human-centered design. I carefully chose design layouts to pull inspiration and design solutions from, but they already knew what they wanted. Because I love uncovering design solutions, I played a big role in the affinity mapping process to ensure that we truly understood what our users' feedback was telling us. Once we entered the design phase, I led conversations with our product owner and implemented design iterations.

E@syFile is now more than 10 years old, and changes in operating systems, together with the capabilities of improved technology and user demand, necessitate updates to the product. These changes will improve the ease and speed of both development and issue resolution, remove the challenges experienced with vendor support for outdated technology, and provide SARS Business with improved operational capability and query resolution.

Problem Statement

E@syFile is now more than 10 years old, and changes in operating systems, together with the capabilities of improved technology and user demand, In simple terms, EasyFile wants to upgrade their app to the new technology but make it user-friendly in its current state.

Final Product

After many tests and iterations, my final product aligned with all the objections I had set in place; it includes the core features necessary for users to find quick and easy ways to register, login, and access all functionality after login with eas

Click here to see all my uFiling Made Easy Prototypes

e@syFile is an important app for the people of South Africa, but I learned that when doing an app for a government institution, it is sometimes difficult because some people just want to get the job done quick and fast (dirty work), and they've got some strict rules that no one can bend even if they want to, especially the designers. But at the end of it all, I had to keep reminding them that the app is for the users, and thus the focus must be on the users who will be using the app at the end. I guess that's what our jobs entail at the end of it all.