Policies
ADP’s policy-based payroll system, replaces confusing, numeric pay codes with plain-language descriptions that are easier for practitioners to configure and manage. The platform and experience allow users to customize and schedule rules for various employee categories, such a salaried or hourly employees, ensuring specific logic for different types of pay: bonuses, overtime, and 401k contributions.
Pre-built policy templates and expert, industry insights allow companies to quickly configure complex earnings and deductions without specialized technical knowledge. Policies provided radical transparency by displaying exact calculations used to determine totals directly on an employee’s digital pay statement. Ultimately, these features transform payroll processing into a more intuitive, flexible, and visible HR function.
View original Product Data Sheet.
Taming Complexity, Driving Alignment, and Validating with Real Users
A year long 0→1 initiative, in a highly dense domain.
Discovery, Alignment & Prioritization
The Challenge: Untangling a highly complex domain (pay groups, deductions, policy dates) without losing the cross-functional team in the weeds.
The Action: I partnered deeply with SMEs to extract core system requirements and understand components of policies. Recognizing the risk of cross-functional miscommunication, I championed the creation of a living, breathing shared vocabulary playbook.
I led focused alignment and prioritization sessions with SMEs and stakeholders to define core capabilities, transforming a massive list into an actionable plan to explore our MVP.
Sense Making & System Architecture
The Challenge: Connecting abstract, heavy policy rules to human-centered design.
The Action: I translated capabilities into tangible artifacts. I mapped out comprehensive future-state user journeys to anchor the team and leadership on user needs and vision.
Simultaneously, I created detailed flow diagrams that successfully mapped the complex, behind the scenes system logic into clear, actionable guidelines for the policy template user experience and interface.
Agile Visualization
The Challenge: Keeping momentum high and illustrating tangential concepts quickly before committing to high fidelity designs.
The Action: Employed rapid, lo-fi sketching on my i-pad to iterate on the fly. This allowed the team to visualize abstract ideas instantly, debate them effectively, and pivot without wasting development or high-fidelity design time.
Rigorous Field Validation & IA
The Challenge: Ensuring an internally built 0-to-1 product actually resonated with external practitioners' mental models.
The Action: We stepped out of the building. Beyond our continuous in-house testing, we brought interactive prototypes to major industry conferences. I facilitated moderated concept testing with pre-planned scenarios and ran open card sorts with dozens of practitioners.
The quantitative and qualitative data gathered from the field directly dictated the final categorization of policies and established a deeply validated IA and concept that we could use to guide our WFN partners.
Finalized Policy Taxonomy (Compensation)
Prototype Demo (401K)