Abstract
This submission
constitutes usability test report for the interface: Form26QB form submission tool
provided by Income Tax Department of India. This form is filled up to submit
Tax Deduction at Source (TDS) when a buyer is involved in property purchase of
more than 50,00,000 Indian Rupee (INR).
Keywords:
Usability Test Report, Form26QB, Tax Deduction at Source
Usability Test Report for Tax Deduction at Source Form
Submission
As
a general rule, most of the people involved in property purchase are happy with
this online system, but a Usability Test for this interface was required as per
author.
Section
I: Introduction
Interface Description
When
a home buyer goes for a reputed registered property purchase in India, as per
Indian government regulation, 1% of the total purchase amount must be paid as
tax deduction at source (TDS) to Taxation Department of India. The property
sellers do not include this TDS in quoted price of the property and as per
widely accepted terminology; buyer himself is responsible to pay this tax to
Indian Government.
Until
recently, it was a tedious job to visit bank branches and pay this tax manually
over the counters. But now, Indian Tax Department has introduced the facility
to pay this via an online system. This online Form 26QB submission is much
better than visiting bank branches out of busy schedule, but need a usability
analysis badly, the author feels.
Interface Goals
Form26QB
submission contains mandatory details about buyer and seller of the property.
After this form submission, end user is directed to online payment system of
the bank and the final receipt generated by online payment system of bank is
used as a proof which may be submitted to the property sellers and Income Tax
Department.
Scope
of this usability test is up to the point, where user has filled up Form26QB.
This filled up form can either be printed for manual submission in the bank, or
the end user may continue to submit the payment online.
Research Questions
Over
all, below mentioned areas were to be felt with eyes of participants:
§
How much comfortable
participant looks like with home page layout and structure? Was he seeking some
help to understand very much taxation specific terms?
§
How much difficult was
it for user to figure out, where to go after home page?
§
What is the user’s
first reaction when he looks at enormous input fields in one go on the form?
§
How much comfortable
the user seems to be when the PAN number validation pop up come on each blur of
the input box?
§
Did the user wanted
verification of both parties’ names immediately after entering PAN number or he
seemed comfortable to wait till confirmation screen?
§
Was the reconfirm of
PAN number too annoying for the participant?
§
Session time out is
set as five minutes and one minute is given for user confirmation in popup, how
much participant is able to get comfortable with this design?
§
The address is divided
into logical entities, does the user like it? Is he OK with the max length of
the input fields here?
§
Did the participant
felt happy about the way amount paid is input?
§
Did the participant
made a mistake while calculating TDS based on % ? Was he able to understand
what Interest and fee structure is?
§
Was the user able to
correlate date of payment with date of tax deduction?
§
In case of errors was
the error message sufficient to fix wrong input?
Section II:
Methodology
Think Aloud Method
As
facilitator, author had to make sure candidates involved in this usability test
know exactly what they were doing, and keep them moving. He made sure to
verbalize their thoughts, means encouraging the candidates think aloud and make
the running narration of what was going on in their mind – what they were
trying to do, what they were looking at and what they wanted to do next.
Test Plan
Equipment/software.
A Dell Laptop with inbuilt microphones and Blueberry FlashBack software
installed was used to record the responses.
Recruitment.
None of the participants was given any kind of incentives for this usability
test. Total five candidates had to be reached. One refused due to
unavailability (Dxxxxx Mxxxx). Another was dropped after starting the session,
because he had used this interface heavily in the past, so he seemed very much
comfortable with everything (Kxxxx Sxxxxx). Contact details of the three
participants are included as a part of Recording Consent Form in Appendix A.
Location. All the candidates were recorded at their own home.
Since there were no incentives involved, none of them was ready to travel. So
the observer visited their home whenever they got available.
Time.
All the three participants were available on the weekend of 30 April 2016 and
01 May 2016. Duration of this test for each participant varied between 50
minutes and 80 minutes, of this recorded session varied between 32 minutes and
47 minutes. This also included other interactions like demographic
questionnaire, probing, wrapping up and additional cross questioning.
Tasks
Scenario.
You purchased an apartment from the builder, Ixxxxxx Sxxxxxxxxxx Ltd, Gurgaon,
Haryana, India on 28 April 2012 on installments. Recently Income tax Department
of India mandates you to pay 1% Tax Deduction at Source, since total value of
your apartment at the time of purchase was
53,36,400 INR which is more than 50,00,000 INR. Today morning, you paid
2,65,531 INR as an installment towards your apartment to the builder. Now, your
next job is to pay Income tax Department of India, 1% of the installment value.
Your task is to use online interface available
as bookmark in your browser and fill Form26QB. Please note, this tool allows
you to visit bank website in same flow and pay online, your task ends when your
reach the point where you have to click to visit bank website. At that point
save the form filled as a pdf for future reference.
Additional
information required to fill this form is on the back of this card.
Below
mentioned are the inputs required to fill the form:
§ Tax
Applicable: Other than Companies
§ Date
of Payment ( To decide Assessment and Financial Year): Today
§ Your
Permanent Account Number: Axxxxxxxxx ( Sole buyer)
§ Permanent
Account No. seller: Axxxxxxxxx (Sole seller)
§ Your
Address: xxxx/xx xxx xxxxxxx xxxxxx, xxxxxx -124001, Haryana, India
§ Address
of seller: Ixxxxxx Sxxxxxxxxxx Ltd., X-xx, xxxxx xx-xxxxxxxxx, xxxxxxxxxx xxxx,
New Delhi – 110044
§ Your
Email Id: xxxxxxxx@xxxxx.xxx
§ Email
Id of seller : XXXX@
§ Your
Mobile Number: +91-XXXXXXXXXX
§ Mobile
Number of seller: +91-
§ Type
of Property: Apartment
§ Address
of Property: Ixxxxxx Exxxxx, Apartment No. XXXX, Sector XXX, Gurgaon- 122011,
Haryana, India
§ Rate
of Tax deduction at Source: 1%
§ Current
Installment in Indian Currency: 265531
§ Total
registered value of the apartment at the time of booking in Indian currency:
5336400
§ Mode
of Tax payment: Online
§ Bank
name via which you will be paying : State Bank of India
Pilot Test
The
Pilot Test greatly helped to improve the task sheet for final usability test
sessions. This was not an actual test but listeners (others than actual three
participants,) gave valuable feedback on how to interact with actual
participants. With previous version of task sheet submitted in test plan, the first
pilot listener was not able to understand, if there were more than one buyers
or sellers. Also, the total assumed value of the property was pointed out to be
very low. She also mentioned that, contact details should be included in
Consent Form itself.
The
second pilot listener pointed that the recording should start in the beginning
of the session itself, but since I had to follow the script, so I ignored this
observation and started recording while taking sign on the form, during first actual
participant’s session. But first participant also, mentioned this later, after
the session.
The
third pilot listener mentioned that observer should ask for overall feedback
and summary from the participants before ending the session. This was not part
of original script in usability plan submitted earlier.
Results
Overview
Overall,
the participants enjoyed the usability test session. They didn’t expect it to
be so entertaining and stress free, as the third participant mentioned
specifically. Overall, more advanced users, who spend more time on the web
didn’t like much the interface, but the new bees mentioned this interface as a
good one.
Participant 1
The
first participant Vxxxx Dxxxx, was not aware of TDS system in India, but he was
getting it confused with regular tax on income. He paid Income Tax on the extra
income in past, and he thought TDS and Income Tax is the same thing. He had
been involved in buying and selling of residential properties in past, but
value of these assets were less than 50,00,000 INR. So, he never used the
interface under consideration in past on actuals. Since he never used this
interface in the past, he qualified to be a participant in this usability test.
Below
mentioned are the observations from Vxxxx:
§ Home
page is less informative than he expected it to be. He wanted some visuals like
images on the home page.
§ Financial
year and assessment year drop downs were disabled. He wanted to be taken to
date of payment input field once he tried to edit these disabled dropdowns.
§ He
was getting puzzled b/w the terms payer/buyer/transferee all over the form. He
wanted the form to use same term all across.
§ He
tried to copy paste PAN number in confirmation box from main input form. If the
input was not exactly 10 digits, it gave an ugly popup, he seemed to be getting
annoyed with that kind of popups.
§ Participant
was extremely unhappy with timeout message box coming every five minutes. He
mentioned that form should record him being active and filling fields, so that
timeout is reset. At another place he mentioned that timeout should be
reasonably longer for the user to input such a large page in one go. It also
suggested that he would have liked a wizard kind of structure with next
buttons.
§ User
was getting annoyed with character limits of some input fields like the one in
address area. He wanted at least a message about character limits, if nothing
less.
§ Even
though information in task card specifically mentioned, he is the sole buyer
and the builder is sole seller, he overlooked this information and wanted the
input fields named "whether more than one buyer" and “whether more
than one seller" to be non-mandatory as an escape route.
§ Also,
the task sheet mentioned date of agreement specifically, but participant missed
this information and tried to play around with this input field. Just to see
what will happen, he also tried putting a future date. The form didn’t alert
about future date immediately, but on submit he got an error.
§ The
task sheet specifically mentioned asset value, but participant assumed it to be
52,00,000 INR, which didn’t affect output of the test, but he made a good point
that, if property value is in 7 digits, installment value input field should
not allow entering 8th digit.
§ He
mentioned that when installment value is being filled, it should on the fly
display what is the outcome of inputs on combined label, since installment
value was being recorded in separate input boxes for lakhs, thousands,
hundreds, tens and ones.
§ He
was not happy that total amount paid/credited is asked again in Tax deposit
details head. He wanted to say that it should be prefilled based on inputs in
amount paid/credited head filled already by him.
§ He
gave suggestion that rate at which TDS is calculated should not be input field,
since end user has not the rights to decide this rate; this value is decided by
Income Tax Department of India.
§ The tax amount should be calculated by form
based on inputs, he mentioned. He feared that users may do calculation mistake
and it made form more tedious.
§ While
filling date of tax deduction, user mentioned that these fields are not very
informative.
§ While
clicking submit, user got the message that date of agreement cannot be future
date. User wanted to be taken to field directly along with this message. He
didn't want to search for that field in clumsy form.
§ Information
in popup should show information sign along with it, if it is a warning it
should also include warning sign in the popup, he mentioned.
§ User
was not happy that acknowledgement number is there is in popup and he couldn’t
copy it from there.
§ User
didn't understand what does minor head code term means (in the final submitted
form) nor was he able to understand information marked in red on the top very
much comfortably, the language may be simplified for normal users, he
mentioned.
§ User
mentioned that UI should be improved; it was very raw kind of screen.
§ User
mentioned that page was too long to fill.
§ User
was not happy with popups coming again and again.
§ User
mentioned that, there has to be something where he can save this information
for future use online and bring it up later if required, including payment
while next installment comes for the apartment.
§ He
rated this site 5 on the scale of 10.
Participant 2
The
second participant Dxxxxxx Bxxx, turned out to be very patient participant.
Despite so many hiccups he continued. Even though he was not able to submit
form successfully, but he gave much valuable inputs on extreme scenarios which
real users would have been facing too.
Below
mentioned are the observations from Dxxxxxx:
§ Unlike
Vxxxx, Dxxxxxx didn't find home page of the website very convincing as a
Government website. He mentioned the need of a logo or some disclaimers or
similar stuff. He seemed concerned about authenticity of the website and was
reluctant to fill information if it would have been his own personal details.
§ The
system allowed instructing browser that, do not show such popups in future. And
the site uses to show important validation messages in popup. The result was at
many important places throughout the form, he would not get validation
messages.
§ He
mentioned that mobile number of buyer should be allowed to be more than 10
digits. Form assumed that user is always in India and mobile number will always
be 10 digits. He mentioned what if buyer is sitting abroad and wants to include
ISD code along with contact number.
§ Like
Vxxxx, he was also not happy with character limit of the input fields,
specifically in Address areas.
§ Authenticity
of session timeout message was found to be questionable by me. The first time
session timeout message came when he was filling PAN numbers. He clicked cancel
at that time on timeout popup, still form continued to accept inputs, rather
than throwing him out of the form. As a patient observer, I didn't disturb the
user and let continue.
§ Now,
when he was filling address of seller - second row, this session timeout
confirmation came again. So, I got the impression that, even if he clicked
cancel first time, his session didn't timeout. This time he clicked OK submit.
§ While
filling email id of seller, user mentioned that ideally website should take
care of upper and lower inputs by itself; this conversion is easy in code. He
wanted to point out towards message he got earlier while filling PAN number.
§ While
filling city of the property purchased, user mentioned that name of this city
had changed recently, it raised a good point of address validation while
filling it. Even user filled city as per task sheet and city is located in
state Haryana. Form allowed selecting state as Delhi. Later user observed it
himself and fixed it.
§ User
was confusing date of agreement with date of payment while filling Date of
agreement field.
§ User
did mistake in calculating 1% of the installment amount. Had the Basic Tax
field been auto populated, this user error could have been avoided.
§ The
interest and fee is payable if the TDS is not paid to Government within one
month of actual payment. Rather than giving this simple message to the end
user, website confused Dxxxxxx with section 234E and Rule 31A(4A) kind of terms
which are difficult to understand. So he just skipped it and continued letting
it to be zero. Had he been doing late payment, he would have never known, he is
doing late payment of TDS, so he owed something more to Income Tax Department
of India. He thought Interest and fee fields are redundant.
§ When
he clicked on submit I found that he had entered wrong PAN number, but since he
had prevented default popup messages of browser in past, he didn't get exact
error message, so he was stuck and verifying information in each input field
one by one. Mode of error message delivery was not good on submit.
§ He
mentioned (while he was verifying fields one by one), if the name of buyer and
seller is populated based on PAN number, while filling form itself, it would
have been helpful and would have made him more confident.
§ Even
after fixing error in PAN number he was not being taken to confirmation page.
He again got session continue confirmation message at this time and he did the
right thing. But still Proceed was not working.
§ Since
proceed was not working he started playing around with Date of Tax deduction
field for no reason. He switched Mode of Payment and bank name was lost. So he
assumed that he didn't selected bank name, that's why he was not able to
submit. Bank name should have been retained, just in case user switches the
radio button and come back to previous selection. If the mode of payment
doesn't require Bank Name, this field should have been hidden rather than
resetting the value.
§ He
tried giving very old date as date of agreement, but it didn't help. After many
verification of inputs, he thought he entered wrong captcha, the moment he hit refresh
captcha, to my surprise he was taken to error_session.asp which said session
had expired, even though he was hitting sessions continue submit diligently all
the time. He was totally confused what happened and had a mix of guilty feeling
and anger that he will have to fill all the information again.
§ This
participant was under impression that before coming to this site to fill this
form, user must do diligent ground work to avoid errors and he gave a rating of
6.5 out of 10 to this website.
Participant 3
The
third participant Cxxxx Sxxxxxxxx, felt not so confident at the start of
session, but she was able to submit Form26QB using this interface successfully.
Below
mentioned are the observations from Cxxxx:
§ She
didn't like colors used on the home page and layout of navigations. She
pointed; terms used on home page are too much technical to understand.
§ Like
other two participants, she also got confused with disabled dropdowns for
Financial Year and Assessment Year. The message in red didn't help her but she
continued further.
§ Transferee/Transferor
were difficult terms for her as compared to buyer/seller on the main form
spread across everywhere.
§ Category
of buyer/seller were input boxes but disabled. She was trying to edit these
values. This could have been labels to avoid confusion or at least different
style sheet could have been applied similar to Financial Year to mark it as
disabled input boxes.
§ Since
there was Full Name of buyer/seller input label mentioned with *, she thought
if she clicks in front of it, she may be able to enter something here. Either
this head should not have been marked as mandatory by * or removed altogether
to avoid confusion.
§ After
trying to click full names, probably by mistake she hit back button, rather
than giving a confirmation message before going to back page it simply went to
home page of website and she lost the information filled till now. So, she
started filling the form again now.
§ Like
other two participants, she was also not happy with session expiration design.
She specifically mentioned why so early?
§ As
Dxxxxxx also mentioned, she was not able to enter ISD code of mobile number.
§ Like
other two participants, she also got stuck while filling seller's address due
to max length limit of input fields.
§ Under
Amount Paid/Credited, for Crores/Lakhs/Thousands/Hundreds/Tens/Ones,
both dropdowns and textboxes were given on the form, she thought she can use
any, but she later figured out textboxes are disabled. There should have been
labels instead of disabled input boxes here. She also mentioned that dividing
whole installment amount in pieces like this is also a pain at first place.
§ Like
other two participants, she was wondering why to enter installment amount again
under Tax Deposit details header.
§ Under
TDS % input box, she was not able to type % sign, she kept wondering why.
§ While
filling TDS actual amount after 1% calculation, she got session timeout
message, but since this input field was not fully filled, on blur of this input
field, validation error came, and for validation message this site uses default
browser popups, so she got confused which one to click first. This gives a suggestion
that, session timeout should not have come when she was active also that,
default browser popups are wrong choice to show validation message by
developer.
§ Like
other participants, red information message regarding Interest and fee field
under Tax Deposit details header, was not sufficient for her to understand what
it means.
§ On
the end of page, there was information, what user do and what should not, e.g. the characters prohibited, she
was almost laughing, why this information is here now. I guess, she wanted this
information earlier before starting filling the form.
§ At
the end of session she gave suggestion that, at least address fields may have
been auto filled after typing few characters. For example, if she type few
characters of city, form should have been smart to start giving Google like
autocomplete suggestions.
§ She
specifically mentioned at the end of session, she found site as very user
friendly, with not much difficultly, she was able to correlate information/task
cards well with the form. She gave a rating of 9 out 10 to this interface.
Summary
All
in all, end user needs lots of homework to fill TDS using the interface
provided, but this is definitely better than giving a visit to the bank,
filling form manually and waiting in long queues. Definitely, with usability
perspective there are lots of improvement areas as suggested by the
participants.
Recommendations
All
the feedbacks and observations in result section above must be fixed, but three
things which must be done right away are mentioned below:
§ Session
timeout must be increased. There are major flaws in this session timeout logic
but, at minimum right away, with no development efforts, with just the
configuration changes, timeout may be increased.
§ Do
not use browser default popups for error messages. This change might be low
effort change but gives maximum results. And that is why it is part of top three
recommendations to be implemented today itself without any delay.
§ When
the user clicks on Form26QB, he should be taken to an information page, where
he should be made knowledgeable about what all he needs to fill in this form.
And then click on next to the form. This is low effort change and can be
implemented right away. This resolves many Usability issues reported by the
participants where they were not aware of the terms and how form behaves.
Probably, on this introduction page, putting a video will also be very helpful.
For example, after going through even a single recorded session mentioned in
Appendix D, end user may fill TDS just in five minutes.
Apart
from above mentioned low risk, low effort, high gain in usability changes,
observations mentioned in the Result sectioned must be planned for future
releases and deployments.
Conclusion
With
the help of diligent participants, observer was able to record a good number of
usability issues in the interface. Definitely more sessions like this will be
helpful for the ongoing development, observer hopes that Income Tax Department
of India will take above mentioned issues on top priority. Observer agrees that
no interface is perfect in this world and Usability Test sessions like this are
important, not only in the interface under consideration but everywhere else
too.
References
Income Tax Department
of India. (n.d.). E-TAX Payment System. Retrieved April 17, 2016, from
https://onlineservices.tin.egov-nsdl.com/etaxnew/tdsnontds.jsp
Krug, S. (2010). Rocket
surgery made easy the do-it-yourself guide to finding and fixing usability
problems. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.
Appendix
A
Recording Consent Forms
Image Removed
Figure
1. Recording Consent Form signed by Participant 1: Vxxxx Dxxxx
Image Removed
Figure
2. Recording Consent Form signed by Participant 2: Dxxxxxx Bxxx.
Image Removed
Figure 3. Recording Consent
Form signed by Participant 3: Cxxxx Sxxxxxxxxx.
Appendix
B
Usability
Test Script
Modified
from Rocket Surgery Made Easy
©
2010 Steve Krug
o
Web browser should be
open to Google or some other “neutral” page.
Hi,
___________. My name is Hemant Kumar, and I’m going to be walking you through
this session today.
Before
we begin, I have some information for you, and I’m going to read it to make
sure that I cover everything.
You
probably already have a good idea of why we asked you here, but let me go over
it again briefly. We’re asking people to try using a Web site that has been
developed by Income Tax Department of India and we want to see whether it works
as intended. The session should take about an hour.
The
first thing I want to make clear right away is that we’re testing the site, not
you. You can’t do anything wrong here. In fact, this is probably the one place
today where you don’t have to worry about making mistakes.
As
you use the site, I’m going to ask you as much as possible to try to think out
loud: to say what you’re looking at, what you’re trying to do, and what you’re
thinking. This will be a big help to us.
Also,
please don’t worry that you’re going to hurt our feelings. We’re doing this to
give valuable improvement suggestions for the site, so we need to hear your
honest reactions.
If
you have any questions as we go along, just ask them. I may not be able to
answer them right away, since we’re interested in how people do when they don’t
have someone sitting next to them to help. But if you still have any questions
when we’re done I’ll try to answer them then. And if you need to take a break
at any point, just let me know.
We
have the ability to use internal microphone of this laptop to record your
voice. With your permission, we’re going to record what happens on the screen
and our conversation. The recording will only be used to help us figure out how
to improve the site, and it won’t be seen by anyone except the people of Income
Tax Department of India and Students/Staff members of Fxxx Hxxx University. And it helps me, because I don’t have to take as many notes.
If
you would, I’m going to ask you to sign a simple permission form for us. It
just says that we have your permission to record you, and that the recording
will only be seen by limited audience as I just explained.
o Give
them a recording permission form and a pen
o While
they sign it, START the SCREEN RECORDER
Do
you have any questions so far?
OK.
Before we look at the site, I’d like to ask you just a few quick questions. (This
includes Demographic Questions also.)
§ First,
what’s your occupation? What do you do all day?
§ Now,
roughly how many hours a week altogether—just a ballpark estimate— would you
say you spend using the Internet, including Web browsing and email, at work and
at home?
§ And
what’s the split between email and browsing—a rough percentage?
§ What
kinds of sites are you looking at when you browse the Web?
§ Do
you have any favorite Web sites?
§ Have
you ever been involved in buying and selling of residential properties in India
value of which was more than 50,00,000 INR ? ( This form is submitted on
purchase of every immovable property , value exceeding 50,00,000 INR; but end
user might not be able to understand meaning of word immovable, so better is
restrict to live example of residential property for the candidate to
understand, what is being asked.)
§ Did
you ever visit a bank to submit Tax Deduction at Source (TDS) when you
purchased this property?
§ Are
you aware that Indian Tax Department now gives the facility to submit TDS
online? Have you ever used this system?
OK,
great. We’re done with the questions, and we can start looking at things.
o
Click on the bookmark
for the site’s Home page.
First, I’m going to
ask you to look at this page and tell me what you make of it: what strikes you
about it, whose site you think it is, what you can do here, and what it’s for.
Just look around and do a little narrative.
You can scroll if you
want to, but don’t click on anything yet.
o
Allow this to continue
for three or four minutes, at most.
Thanks. Now I’m going
to ask you to try doing some specific tasks. I’m going to read each one out
loud and give you a printed copy.
And again, as much as
possible, it will help us if you can try to think out loud as you go along.
o
Hand the participant
the task sheet, and read it aloud.
o
Allow the user to
proceed until you don’t feel like it’s producing any value or the user becomes
very frustrated.
Thanks,
that was very helpful.
§ Would
you like to summarize your experience with this interface?
§ On
the scale of 10 how much do you want to rate this website ?
§ Do
you have any questions for me, now that we’re done?
o
Stop the screen recorder
and save the file.
o
Thank them and escort
them out.
Appendix
C
Scenario
card
Figure
4. Scenario card, front side.
Appendix
D
Links to Video Recordings
Participant1 (Vxxxx Dxxxx):
Participant 2 (Dxxxxxx Bxxx):
Participant 3 (Cxxxx Sxxxxxxxxx):
