The Ugly

For the past several years I've used TurboTax for the Web, a great alternative to the standalone program, and what I believed would be a great alternative to the onerous and invasive Product Activation forced on users who buy and use the desktop version.

But some recent experience with this very site shows some design decision making that results in high user frustration.

One of the advantages of having a web-based application is the capability to get at your information, but not only from anywhere. Also anywhen. I've used that before when I've needed copies of past tax returns. I could just sign in to my account and get a copy to print out. (This is advantageous also to people who buy new computers and never moved their data from old ones.)

The current design of the TurboTax for the Web site doesn't allow this. Once you sign in, your only options are to start a new return or continue an existing return (for the current tax year).That any past information isn't made obvious once you sign in is a significant flaw.

Compounding the issue was the utter inability to get support. Intuit provides only a web-based application, no email addresses. Unfortunately, I was unable to get this application to work. With both Netscape Navigator 7 and Internet Explorer 6 I was unable to proceed because the site claimed I needed to enable accepting cookies. Trouble was, accepting cookies was enabled with both browsers. But because the web application wouldn't work, I could never get to the form to fill out problem information.

When I sent email to what would typically be standard support addresses (such as support@intuit.com and support@turbotax.com), I received form responses saying essentially that the email addresses weren't used for anything, and giving me the URLs to the "support" site address--the same pages that didn't work before.

In using this tactic, Intuit seems to want to isolate itself from its users, rather than support them. This take-the-money-and-run tactic has typically been reserved for companies that corner the market, such as Microsoft, and can they do as they please. But the result is an utter failure in designing a product to successfully meet user needs.