Who enjoys doing taxes?
The answer is obvious. No one. It’s one of those things that, even though the result for lots of Americans is a juicy refund check, we really just hate having to do. Taxes require lots of forms. Forms from your employer, forms about health insurance, forms about investments, forms about everything under the sun, and if you have a more complicated financial situation? Forget about it. It’s a maze that no one without a certification can navigate. Or is it?
Like most of us at this time of year, I threw my pile of coffee-stained forms on my desk and opened up an online tax preparation site. This year was different, however. I noticed how easy it was. How simple and direct the questions were. Do you have a child? No. Done. Did you work more than one job? No. Done. Did you pay student loans? Yes. Drop the info in. Done. I’m a little ashamed to admit, but I loved it. I’m a sucker for process. And this process made an annoying Saturday-afternoon-consuming headache a 20-minute breeze.
Naturally, I started thinking about how I could apply this to my work.
Our business has nothing to do with taxes. Efficiency and clear communication is our secret weapon. We believe that a combination of tools, process and people are the best way to execute our work. BXP Creative isn’t a contest system where you get flooded with tons of crap designs and artificial time constraints. Nor are we an “unlimited” graphic design service with tons of caveats and hard concurrent project limits. Our premise is simple: through our efficient system, we can provide great creative at a great price.
Sounds pretty good, right? We think so. Our process and people are right where we want them and we’re proud of that. But we’ve found that we’re outgrowing our tools, and that they don’t do as much as we’d like. Sure, the current tools ask our users important questions about the projects they want to outsource. They produce creative briefs that inform quickly without being burdensome. They allow instant communication on dedicated project threads, connecting a user and a project manager at any distance. But we never want to be stagnant. We know our system could be more user-oriented, more approachable, less restrictive, and mobile-friendly.
So we’ve decided to build an entirely new one.
This blog series will track our progress through the development of our new BXP Creative platform. That includes a new logo, branding, social media push, and most importantly, a brand new set of tools. Internally, we call it BXP2, but really the name isn’t important. What matters is that if we do our jobs well, it’s going to take a process as complex and annoying as doing your taxes and make it a super-simple and maybe…an enjoyable one.
In the coming weeks and months, we’ll dig into the individual features of the new platform, why we decided to do this over that, and explain our thinking in certain areas. We’ll share our excitement, successes, and yes, probably some failures too. But our hope is that through this look under the hood we’ll connect with people who are genuinely interested in what we offer and that it will help us better understand our users’ needs and priorities too. We hope you’ll come along for the ride.
