From Marginal to Satisfactory: User Experience Benchmarking and Redesign of Indonesia's Coretax Portal

Indonesia's Core Tax Administration System (Coretax) was launched on January 1, 2025, amid significant implementation and usability challenges; tax revenue in February 2025 dropped 30.2% year-on-year, treated as contextual evidence of implementation disruption rather than solely UX failure; and a paid ‘jockey’ economy indicated widespread task completion difficulties. This study aims to: identify the global Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for web-based tax portal UX; benchmark the current Coretax design against the identified global CSFs; and provide evidence-based redesign recommendations. Methods: focused literature review with 4 databases (Scopus, IEEE Xplore, ACM and ScienceDirect) supplemented by targeted grey literature, a structured 8-dimensional heuristic audit of retained studies according to ISO/IEC 25010, a high-fidelity HTML/CSS and Figma prototype and re-evaluation of the prototype using the same framework. Results: The original portal scored 14/32 (44%, MARGINAL), and System Reliability was the only dimension under Not Met that was associated with macroeconomic impact. Within the same expert-based heuristic framework, the redesign was estimated at 23/32 (72%, SATISFACTORY +9 points) in seven out of eight dimensions. Key CSFs of emerging-economy tax portals are: Reliability, task-oriented navigation, embedded onboarding, and quality contextual information. While system reliability and full accessibility continue to rely on broader infrastructure and compliance efforts, UI-layer enhancements can enhance perceived usability, learnability, information transparency, trust communication and user support. These findings provide practical implications for DJP and other emerging-economy tax authorities: UI-layer redesign is a low-cost but high-impact intervention deployable independently of infrastructure readiness to improve compliance intention and reduce user abandonment.