The Addiction
"The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates and a monthly salary" Nassim Taleb.
Yet, employees need to track their salaries. HR and people managers need to change them. Payroll managers need to use salaries to create precise payslips. I helped the Personio product team in Payroll rebuild this requested feature by customers. Here's how we did it.
The goal of the project was to redesign and re-platform this legacy feature.
This presented a set of challenges, and constraints but exciting opportunities.
My contribution
Product strategy User research Product design
The team
2 × product managers
1 × product designers
4 × engineers
1 × researcher
1 × UX writer
Year
2022
Personio
Personio is a complete HR platform. From recruiting to payroll. A B2B SaaS.
It's targeted to different user personas: HR managers, Employees, People managers, Recruiters, and even CEOs.
The core personas are HR managers however. And in my case — people that take care of employee's salaries as a Job-to-be-Done.
The platform offered a way to record compensations: Main salary, Bonuses. And other Recurring or Non-Recurring payments. But, it had a lot of improvement opportunities.
In fact, the amount of expectation from the customers was a challenge in itself. We had to rank and focus our efforts on things that mattered.
Inflexible and prescriptive
There are different types of compensation. And different "behaviors" of these compensations depending on the employment status. A "fixed salary" is taxed differently under parental leave for example. In Personio we offered a set of defined "terms" and "behavior" for compensations. However, there were too few, and couldn't be renamed or reconfigured.
New Conceptual Model
How do you allow an HR intern to change someone's salary, without risking applying the wrong taxation?
I worked with the PM in my team to define a new Product Conceptual Model for individual compensation components.
Tailored to different personas, with respective access rights.
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Payroll Experts
For personas that have high expertise in running Payroll and understand taxation and government laws. -
HR Leads
Personas that define the customer's compensation strategy and benefits offered to all employees. With some expertise in payroll. -
HR Managers or People Managers
People that handle day-to-day tasks in changing employee salaries. For smaller companies, this is handled by a CEO or an intern mentioned above. Low to no expertise in payroll.
These "3 layers" had respective configuration areas of the product to define one compensation type. In Personio's back office for experts, Settings area for HR Leads. These changes happen very rarely.
And last, in the Salary section of each employee - edits might happen even daily.
Payroll Experience Map
Salary is one of the main "inputs" to run a correct Payroll. Personio is working on an automated solution and the quality of these inputs should be impeccable. No one likes to get the wrong salary and taxation. For configurations that matter it's done by experts. Besides salary entries, Payroll needs employee personal data and absences.
I worked on an extensive experience map. Of all the experiences and respective personas that created or modify data. It showed how different teams need to contribute seamlessly, to achieve the goal of automated payroll. Salary is only one part of the puzzle.
Research interviews and synthesis
We followed a habit of continuously interviewing customers. Once we booked a customer user different teams could ask questions relevant to our teams. In my case it was salary.
I was collaborating with the researcher to structure the interview script, take notes and of course, debrief on the findings. After 10 customer interviews, we started to see patterns and the most important pain points. Some examples:
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Can't have multiple "fixed salaries".
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Can't have more than 12 salaries per year.
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No idea what's the difference between recurring Bonus and normal recurring compensation.
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etc.
The main pain points were about the ability to have a more flexible configuration. This is where we anticipated that the new model would solve. It's flexible but with smart defaults.
Plus, I had a couple of customer feedback sources: research insights from user interviews, customer support reports, and sales department feedback. And our own internal HR peeps that use our own product.
I synthesised all input under a big Notion board. Together with the team, applying some critical thinking, we ranked all pain points and focus areas. For our product roadmap.
Competitive analysis
As lead designer of the entire Payroll tribe. I was working on the new Personio Payroll experience.
I worked on an extensive product Competitive Analysis of "how other products prepar data for payroll". Salary was not my main focus at that time but is one part of the equation.
I found some interesting approaches and mental models from different companies. I analysed Payfit, BambooHR, Gusto, HiBob and FactorialHR.
The research suggested that we were going in the right direction as different countries and customers name salary lines differently. We nailed the foundation.
Settings wireframe
After the engineering team was on board with the new model and split of configurations. I worked on a wireframe to show how a user would change the settings. With different macro sections and salary grouping. Keep in mind that none of that was possible on the platform at that time. You couldn't even rename "Gym benefit" to something else.
The key moment is the "mapping". To stay compliant and have the correct taxation — you had to bind it to a specific compensation name. Like an alias.
The wireframe allowed us to have meaningful conversations with customers. And ask if we were going in the right direction. They loved it.
UI iterations with smaller scope
When we defined our team roadmap — we kept the wireframe concept as a vision. And started defining different steps to achieve it. This helped engineers scope precise user stories and sprint goals.
One of the first iterations was to redesign the Settings UI. And introduce crucial parts of the functionality that our users requested. Rename, Delete, Change Payout frequency, etc.
With each iteration, we would add extra features while doing usability tests.
Employee Salary UI
What is important to employees while checking their salary? What about HR Managers? This is one of the challenges I had when designing the interface for more personas. Currently, Personio doesn't have a role-specific micro-frontend. We had to define one size that fits all.
Plus, if people use your product as their daily tool. All iterations need to be gradual and have feature parity.
From talks with our users, a common answer was: "I just want to see the salary".
Dead simple answer on the surface. It means that we over-optimized for management. We introduced 3 macro sections:
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Overview
"Just see salary." -
Annual Table
Overview for insights. -
Compensations
For edit and management.
Conclusion
No one cares about salary management until something goes wrong. Once a month. Employees didn't get their well-deserved bonus. HR managers need to manage many tools to "run for correct data".
It's very satisfying to help people do their daily jobs easier and faster. This helps them focus on more meaningful things.
Once we have the foundation established, we can look into innovation opportunities. If combined with an automated Personio Payroll. Compensation growth graph, Net vs Gross salary, Integrate digital or PDF payslip, and many more.