Amazon Gaia – Centralized Tax Audit Management Hub

Overview

Amazon Gaia is a dedicated work hub for tax audits, consolidating tasks, documents, and data into one centralized platform. It empowers tax teams to manage audits end-to-end, enabling collaboration, self-service data extraction, and streamlined workflows.


The Problem

Audit activity grew 50% annually over the last 3 years, and is projected to increase 120% over the next 3 years. Teams relied on spreadsheets, emails, and disconnected tools, leading to:

  • Disorganized workflows and unclear ownership

  • Weeks-long delays to gather data from multiple systems

  • Limited visibility into audit status and risks


Project Goals

  • Centralize all audit-related work into one platform

  • Enable self-service data access to reduce dependency on support teams

  • Provide real-time visibility across global audits

  • Reduce audit turnaround time from weeks to days


My Role

I led the UX design and product vision for Gaia, focusing on:

  • Discovery & Research: Conducted user interviews to build personas, map the current workflow, and uncover pain points.

  • Product Vision & Strategy: Defined the experience strategy, ensuring Gaia combined project management, data access, and workflows.

  • Experience Design: Designed the audit lifecycle dashboard, task management flows, and self-service data extraction experience.

  • Prototyping & Testing: Created interactive prototypes and led usability testing with global tax teams, iterating for clarity and efficiency.


User Feedback & UX Impact

  • Adoption: 80% of users engaged weekly

  • UX Satisfaction:

    • CSAT: 4.05 / 5

    • Ease of Use: 4.11 / 5

    • Helpfulness: 4.05 / 5

Positive UX Highlights:

  • Intuitive Navigation:
    “Easy navigation and user-friendly.”

  • Centralized Experience:
    “It is simple to use and has everything we need in one place. I like it far more than out old tool.”

  • Self-Service Workflows:
    “A reasonable self-serve tool to obtain PII data for the audit.”

  • Clear Status Updates:
    “Status updates have been particularly helpful to reduce the need for check-ins.”

Design process

user research

To understand user needs, I conducted 30+ hours of user interviews with Tax teams globally—and this research is ongoing.


Personas

From the initial interviews, I synthesized the findings into 2 personas representing our primary user types.

 
 

Current user journey

I created a current-state journey map to visualize how users complete tasks today and where the pain points occur.


Design demo

 

Notice overview

The overview page provides a clear summary of the notice’s requirements and the current status.

 

Task list

The task page serves as the central place to track all tasks related to the notice.

 

Task

Inside one specific task, one can find all the information needed to complete the task and track the task progress.

 

AI for task

Utilize gen-AI to help answer the questions from the government auditors.

 

This project is on-going.

Customer feedback
“Our ability to track, comprehensively, all of our active work in a centralized tool has been a game changer. Gaia captures all aspects of our process with agility, placing audit details, status, and reporting at our fingertips. It has closed the communication gap that occurs when working with global teams.” 
- Senior Tax Manager, US State and Local Tax