Payroll Innovation (Pi)
Transforming a 40-year legacy mainframe into a real-time, user-centric cloud experience.
My Role: Senior UX Designer
The Challenge: For four decades, payroll at ADP relied on complex, batch-processed mainframe computations. The process was notoriously labor-intensive, stressful, and opaque for users. My role on the Payroll Innovation UX team was to collaborate to modernize this engine and completely humanize the experience, shifting the system from a rigid, clunky tool depending on workarounds, into a transparent, "trusted assistant."
Design Led Strategy
Drove product vision using JTBD (Jobs to be Done), journey mapping, and 1-page strategic briefs to keep teams aligned on business and user goals.
Discovery & Validation
Executed end-to-end research programs spanning ethnographies, contextual inquiry, participatory design, heuristic evaluation, and unmoderated and moderated testing.
Show me the details. It’s my data, why can’t I see it all? Am I even doing this correctly? Don’t make me look for it. If the information exists, bring it to me.
The Approach & What Made it Special: This wasn’t about redesigning a UI; it was about our team driving a cultural shift towards design-thinking across the organization. What made this initiative unique was our focus on cross-functional alignment and storytelling. To bridge the gap between C-suite expectations and user realities, I utilized unconventional artifacts—like mock press releases, storyboards, and “concept car” prototypes.
I helped democratize our research practices and processes, by making research opportunities accessible to our product, engineering and SME partners. They participated in contextual inquiries, concept testing, user testing, and participatory design. This reduced opinion-based misalignment and our design recommendations became evidence-backed strategies that directly influenced the long term product roadmap.
Key Competencies & Methodologies
Advanced Prototyping
Built low-to-high fidelity artifacts, including live Ruby code and Axure prototypes, to test complex data scenarios and interactivity.
Pay codes are complex and hard to manage. I am having to translate or get my ADP rep to help do anything.
Cross-Functional Evangelism
Facilitated collaborative ideation and design sessions with internal product teams, Strategy, Marketing and Legal to ensure seamless integration and brand alignment.
The Vision
Grounded in Evidence, Guided by Principles
How is this configured? I feel like I have no control over my own payroll. I shouldn’t have to call ADP so much.
