The Challenge
As the lead UX Designer, I was tasked with leading the redesign of certain features of a HR/Employee facing mobile app for a major utilities company. The goal of this project was to migrate the app to a new host, which offered an opportunity to make UI/UX improvements
The original HR Payroll app had a few major visual and usability issues.
Critical information, such as Net Pay was hard to find and blended in with other, less important information.
There was a lack of visual heirarchy and it made the screens hard to scan quickly.
Some information, like Year-to-Date totals and benefits breakdowns were confusing to users.
Our goal was to simplify how employees view and interpret their pay, while maintaining accuracy, compliance, and performance across devices.
Research & Strategy
To tackle this project, I first needed to understand how users interacted with the app. The main audience for this app were linemen working on power lines, meaning they were hourly workers with variable pay. To understand them, I conducted:
Contextual inquiries with these users to observe how users found certain pay information, and understand their thoughts and feedback
A heuristic audit of the existing interface to identify accessibility, hierarchy, and interaction issues.
A stakeholder interview with both stakeholders and engineers to align on business constraints and technical dependencies related to the migration.
This project did not allow for a major usability overhaul, but from my research, I uncovered a key insight:
Users primarily opened the app to confirm their net pay and deductions at a glance, and yet this information blended in with everything else on the screen.
Net pay is hard to find and buried in this page
The Design Process
The Solution
After a few weeks of design testing and iterating, the final design was an improved experience that prioritized the information linemen were looking for - Net Pay.
Reflections
This project showed that often times we miss the most obvious improvements.
The tech stack for major UI improvements was limited, but improving the visual heirarchy and ensuring the most important information was immediately scannable improved this experience tenfold, and was greatly appreciated by employees who just wanted to know their paycheck.