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Case Study
A Flag in the Sand
Paylocity | 2024
Strategy
research
IA
UX / UI Design
Prototyping
Influence

Background

Paylocity had grown into a comprehensive HCM platform through years of product expansion. But the user experience was neglected, with fragmented navigation, unpredictable, inconsistent workflows. And without a coherent design strategy, they found themselves with a platform architecture that doesn't effectively work for anybody.

Competitor marketing and customer feedback echoed the same friction points: poor usability, data silos, and an experience that felt assembled rather than considered.

It was "payroll-first, everything else tacked on."

Discovery

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Who & How

Team
Mark Iris | Distinguished Product Designer
‍Gayle Denney | Principal UX Researcher

Timeline
‍6-8 months discovery, prototype, present

Goal
Explore what a next-generation human-centered HRIS experience should be, and proving it through rigorous rapid prototyping.

Discovery | 2 mos.
Establish a foundation of knowledge

Concepting | 3 mos.
Visualize & validate strategic direction

Realization | 2.5 mos.
Combine with new design language for cohesive vision

Strategic Framing

A flag in the sand

A North Star is static and dictatorial — it's a big bet skewed by opinion that's hard to reach and inflexible when the market moves. A flag in the sand is visible to everyone on the beach. It marks the direction clearly, without prescribing the exact path.

This framing gave teams and stakeholders shared orientation while preserving the autonomy to interpret and route independently toward strategically aligned outcomes.

Crucially, a "flag in the sand" can be picked up and moved as new information comes to light.
Discovery

Foundational knowledge

Our understanding of the current state was established through exhaustive research activities: external customer interviews, internal SME interviews, customer feedback synthesis across thousands of support interactions, competitive analysis of 25+ platforms, HR industry & trend analysis, and task & traffic analysis across the full Paylocity platform.

Research outputs fed directly into 10 guiding theses, each one a proveable hypothesis about what the platform's experience model should do and why.

Customer feedback synthesis

Among the many data streams available to us, I went through 18 months of raw customer NPS feedback, scrubbed it and pulled out 10 prominent themes, organized into NN's usability heuristic framework.

Issue prominence dictated importance relative to the others. Here we can get a data-driven UX impact statement.

IA inventory

Created a comprehensive inventory of every link, destination, product and fuction, defining the target persona, platform availability, purpose & importance.

This was the first artifact for an IA overhaul, leading to a few rounds of tree-testing & card sorting.

Task & traffic analysis

It became clear we needed a single system architecture that works for 3 core archetypes: Employees, Managers, and Admins.

In-depth task & traffic analysis indicated prevalence & preference across archetypes. I was able to extrapolate patterns and outliers between archetypes to form a role-based framework that scales for complexity and works for everyone.

Object model map

Using the OOUX process, I mapped out every object and entity across the platform, defining relationships, properties & attributes between objects.

Studying the density of connections between 2,000+ "stickies" in this board illustrated what the organization model should be. Center objects around core archetypes and organizational structures, with things like permissions, workflows, tasks, notifications, etc. connecting them.

Concepting

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Guiding Theses

01

Validated
All core archetypes are employees

Additive navigation model that scales from Employee → Manager → Admin,  95%+ of users are an employee in addition to another role. Design for EEs first.

02

Validated
Profile is the main destination for personal actions

"Me" hub as a centralizing object for self-service tasks. Profiles surface different content depending on who is viewing them and their relation to the record.

03

Validated
Contextualize the user within their organization

Human-centered header: Home / Me / Team / Company. The sub-nav is nested within product hubs, dramatically reducing global navigation complexity.

04

Validated
Platform requires multiple wayfinding methods

Structural nav, contextual content module links, and global search provide three distinct modes: structural, contextual, and precise.

05

Validated
Dual-role users need global access to products

Left-rail icon menu (Variant A) vastly outperformed a hidden "Tools" dropdown (Variant B). Persistent left-nav preferred over hub-only access.

06

Validated
Products ordered to match mental models

Workflow/archetype-ordered hubs outperformed alphabetical ordering — users found destinations faster and with more confidence.

07

Validated
Action centers should be grouped in proximity

A combined To Do panel (Tasks + Messages + Alerts) under a single badged entry point was preferred over separate inbox and tasks icons.

08

Validated
Home screen personalized by role and urgency

Role-based default home configurations with customization. Pay widget obfuscated by default. Manager home content needed additional iteration.

09

Validated
Intelligence everywhere is a leading strategy

Insight dashboards within product hubs became the #1 favorite thing among dual-role users — consistently described as superior to anything in their current platform.

10

Validated
Centralize HR communications

Featured announcements and role-specific communications surfaced on the Home digest, providing HR Admins a broadcast channel within the platform experience.

Clocking the competition

Best in class

No matter how complex, the process is the same.

I run every competitor through a heuristic evaluation, discern the positives and negatives of each, and begin to form an opinion of bad, average, good, & great.

Eventually my opinion congeals into a position. From that conviction, I apply my perspective back to the challenge.

Instead of striving for "great," I design for BEST.
Why compete if not to win?
Emergent platform

Additive model

The greatest aha-moment was the realization that employees, managers and admins are all employees first, with access needs spawning out from that center.

Design an employee experience that gracefully scales outward as complexity increases.

Managers should have their own personal space + management tools & team spaces.

Admins should have their own personal space + access to all relevant products across the suite (depending on role).

Employee experience

All users get the standard EE experinece. A customizeable home screen, a "Me" hub where they can do all their own personal work, and a "Company" hub, which serves as your organization's cumstom, whitelisted intranet.

Manager experience

For managers, the home screen adds team and mgmt-related widgets. They also get a new "Team" hub, a single place to go to view and manage their team at a glance.

Priduct hubs are added to a navigation menu, granting access to specialized product hubs, where specialized work can be done across targeted domains like scheduling, performance, recruiting, etc.

Note: testing actually uncovered the new product opportunity for a focused hub for management duties.

Admin experience

Admin home screens will populate with personal widgets and role-specific widgets. Menu navigation will be populated with product hubs relevant to their role and access. For example, a recruiting specialist would see different menu items than a benefits admin, etc.

Testing revealed that all admins need a full employee directory for reporting and bulk action purposes.

Action center

Messages, tasks and alerts were previously spread across the platform into different spaces, causing confusion, signal noise, and functional inconsistencies.

We tested multiple solutions to this problem, and based on testing results, determined that a single "Action center" combining all 3 "actionable" or "badgeable" content formats lends itself to focus and clarity. A single place to complete all of your "to do's."
User testing

4 iterations, 65+ sessions

Here's an insight reel from our first round of user testing. For each testing round, we interviewed 4+ employees, 4+ managers, and 4+ admins, combining PCTY and non-PCTY participants.

After each round, a rapid iteration occurs to validate or invalidate different assumptions. The final prototype (including mobile), resulted in an 85+ SUS, and a 90%+ task completion rate.

While we were still working in black and white lo-fi designs, results were obvious and trending.  We were confident in our direction and decided any further testing at this fidelity is uneccesary. We've captured the flag and planted it in the sand.

Realization

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Completing the vision

Expressing a new design language

With new leadership and design talent flooding into PCTY, the UX team was defining a new design language for the company and product experience while all of this platform discovery work was happening.

We decided the combination of both workstreams would be a vital deliverable to get the message across. Let's combine this new, validated platform model with our burgeoning design language for a cohesive design strategy.

To complete this, we opened up the project to a team of 6+ UXers to stress test our desing language by applying them in realistic and comprehensive interface scenarios.

Vision reel

After multiple rounds of executive presentations, coworking sessions, internal pressure testing, we launched a roadshow to product owners, UXers, and engineering leads. The project had enough name recognition to carry weight throughout the organization.

From there, we changed the initiative's name from "Project Mandalorian" (this is the way), to PCTY NEXT.

The team rallied together behind the vision and produced this internal commercial, an efficient and effective way to get all of these complex ideas across to any audience.
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