Retirement Payroll Processing
Role
Lead UX Designer
Team Lead
Responsibilities
Exploratory research
Evaluative research
Low & high fidelity visual design
Prototyping
Facilitation
Team
2 Product Managers
8 Software Engineers
1 Lead UX Designer
1 Jr UX Designer
Duration
16 Months
Project Overview
Problem & Catalyst
This client had almost 8000 customer entities that were still using paper and fax to submit all their employees’ retirement accounts information and sending checks for the actual contributions. A digital solution existed for these customers to use but it required manually entering in participant data every pay period and it was fairly dated by the time this project was initiated.
The client had an internal team of four people that spent their time manually entering the mailed or faxed information into an internal system and providing end-customer support for any client customer entities. The client team was sinking hours into this due to its manual nature and due to the potential of errors and needed to fix them with so much manual input.
Goals
Create an online application to streamline submission of retirement account information and payments
Show how a cross-functional, autonomous product team could build a production-quality app rapidly
1
Most participants were payroll coordinators that were responsible for submitting retirement plan contribution info to our client
Building the MVP
Kickoff
To begin the project, I organized a kickoff workshop with client team members and stakeholders to align on the following:
goals (user & experience, business, tech, engagement)
target user groups
risks & dependencies
timeline & milestones
Double Diamond methodology
Exploratory User Interviews
I partnered with the Product Managers on the team to conduct user interviews with users from our client’s customer base who were responsible for payroll and retirement processing in their offices.
Our objectives were to better understand these users’ roles in processing payroll and retirement contribution information and how they were doing those tasks at the time.
Based on our generative interviews and existing data about the user base, we were able to generate a persona to hone our teams’ focus on for the first iteration of this product:
Ideation
I conducted a couple internal ideation sessions with the team to see how we might help the payroll processing coordinators easily upload their employees’ retirement account information to our client’s systems.
We took a page out of the playbook of marketing platform Mailchimp regarding their feature of importing a .csv of a contacts list and matching each column to a data type and saving that configuration for later use.
I created a future state user journey to identify the key steps in the new process and validated it with the software engineers. After that, I started sketching various fidelities of the process to the point of wireframes which you can see below:
Current & Future State Flows
Initial Mockups
MVP Wireframes
2
Some participants worked with another department like accounting or finance to send payment for those retirement account contributions to our client
Key Interview Findings
3
Most employers conducted payroll on a bi-weekly basis, but some did it monthly
Persona
4
Most of the users could obtain a .csv or .xlsx version of the payroll and retirement contribution info (this was a tech consideration we needed to validate)
5
Most participants used our client to manage retirement accounts but used a third party vendor to manage payroll
Conceptual Testing
I scheduled conceptual testing interviews with seven users, most from the exploratory interviews. The purpose of this was to test our overall concept of a file import of the retirement contribution information.
Key Testing Findings:
1
Most participants like the overall concept and indicated they would likely use it
MVP Design
2
Most participants indicated they would use a digital payment method if we built it
After initial research and conceptual testing, I started building the higher fidelity designs in Sketch. The client was building a new design system and component library for the space we were working in, so I used many of the elements that were in that library while adding some that were missing at the time.
Due to technical complexity and a request from program management to deliver an MVP of the app sooner than initially expected, we had to make concessions on the some of the intended functionality and interaction. For instance, if a user submitted a file with format errors, they would need to correct the file and resubmit or strip the records in the process and submit those later as opposed to having the capability to fix it in the app.
Improving the MVP
Editing File Information in the Application
The next major capability on our roadmap was providing users a way to edit or fix records from the .csv in our application. In our conceptual testing, most users indicated they’d prefer to edit their file and any errors in the app itself.
Unfortunately, we weren’t given the chance to do initial conceptual or user testing for this functionality so I was creating designs based on insight from the internal retirement processing team and feedback from the client UX team.
Copying Previous Submissions
The client stakeholders asked us to create a Copy capability in the application that would allow users to copy a previous submission instead of importing a new file. They wanted this for two reasons:
There were at least 1200 customer entities that had less than 25 participants in their systems, so copying a previous submission that required few changes may be easier than uploading a new file
The legacy application that would be decommissioned in the future had the Copy capability which many customer entities used
Again, we were not given the opportunity to interview the end users for this. However, we were able to do some contextual inquiry and observation of the client’s internal support team using the Copy functionality in the legacy application. This allowed us to understand at least how these internal users copied previous submissions, which features were helpful, and which features or steps had some friction and opportunity for improvement.
Accessing Previous Submissions
The last piece of functionality I’ll show that we created was a search history of previous submissions. This would allow users to do the following:
view and audit previous submissions
finish incomplete submissions
electronically send payment for submissions that were awaiting payment for contributions
edit or delete completed but unprocessed submissions
Wrapping Up & Retrospective
What We Accomplished
We were able to deliver the initial MVP within four months of starting development, much to positive feedback from users
I created a modified and custom version of the process for a $1B customer entity of the client
More than a third of the targeted customer entities have adopted the solution, which was more than what the program hoped for in terms of conversion
What I Learned
The client stakeholders regularly wanted to see clickable prototypes of the designs I was creating, which led to hundreds of screens that were hard to maintain. I had to learn to ask the client stakeholders to suspend some disbelief before we could have engineers actually build those capabilities and test them in a sandbox
We built a fair amount of capabilities without doing the kind of generative or evaluative research I would have hoped for. In some cases, this was due to some client stakeholders not wanting to “bother” users again or in other cases believing they had enough knowledge to make decisions without research. This reinforced my passion and pursuit to learn how to better advocate the need for user research and testing throughout a product lifecycle.
Feedback from Teammates
“...With designs, Alex ensured we were not only building the product right but building the right product. He conducted user interviews to back up his designs with data and constantly evolved based on user feedback. He kept communication with client designers to voice the concerns of our team and used their feedback to keep our product fluid with existing products. Alex was constantly engaged with the developers as his designs advanced. He was open to discussion from a developer standpoint and was able to mend his designs based on our feedback.”
“As the first release of the product came to fruition and the project was extended for another 16 weeks, it became clear that Alex’s work creating high fidelity mock-ups was key to that extension. The designs he showcased were praised regularly and ‘led the way’ when it came to mapping high level product features & strategy into visible, easily understandable interactive stories.”