Paylocity is an enterprise payroll and human capital management (HCM) solution that helps businesses streamline pay, HR, benefits, and workforce management. I started at Paylocity as the sole UX Designer for Paylocity’s 3 benefits administration product offerings. In just 8 months, I was promoted to UX Team Lead for a new Benefits product group, becoming the only remote UX manager. By the end of my time at Paylocity, I managed a team of 7 designers working across the Benefits, CoreHR, and Talent product domains.
Role: UX Team Lead
Tenure: Jun 2018 – Mar 2021 (2 yrs 10 mos)
Location: Orlando, Florida (Remote)
Organization Impact
- Provided design vision for improved UX across Paylocity’s benefits product offerings
- Partnered with our in-house talent team on improvements to Paylocity’s hiring process
- Mentored and coached a team of designers to ensure design quality across the organization
- Invited guest speakers for a UX team onsite and a series of virtual lunch’n learn events
- Drove Accessibility compliance and co-presented about WCAG guidelines at a product org meetup
Project Highlights
User Personas
One of the cross-suite UX initiatives I worked on as an individual contributor during my first few months at Paylocity was a research project to understand the traits, behaviors, and needs of our primary user personas. I interviewed sales, support (both remote and in-person at the Lake Mary, FL office), product, and implementation experts to distill our many user types down to a small set of archetypical personas that could be used to set the stage for product design conversations.
- Persona prototype headers (pdf)
- Sample project intro page using persona header (pdf)
- Full wiki documentation for Warren Mack (pdf)
Diversity & Inclusion Initiative
At Paylocity, our HCM tools reinforced our belief system by not only providing our clients with tools to define and assess diversity and equality, but also surfacing inclusive experiences along the entire employee lifecycle – from Recruitment to Retirement. I worked with 2 product designers on my team and a product manager to develop these concepts to make our suite more inclusive.
Benefits in Mobile
When I started as a designer at Paylocity, benefits was not available in the mobile app. I worked with my product partners on a concept brief for what the cross-channel employee experience could be. To get there, I conducted a Jobs To Be Done study to generate ideas, did competitive analysis on what other benefits administration systems offered, and developed a North Star prototype for what benefits in mobile should look like. The MVP that we ended up releasing only represented a tiny portion of what I wanted to achieve, but provided a solid foundation for future development.
Hiring Process Improvements
I learned a lot about hiring diverse and uniquely talented team members from my time at Mailchimp and was very involved with the interview process in every product org I’ve been part of. At Paylocity, I was the primary hiring manager for new product designers, working closely with our talent team to refine our screening, design challenge, and interview process. I led an effort to allow candidates to discuss a personal portfolio item as a design challenge alternative and rewrote our design challenge itself so that it was no longer based on time off requests – a core business function of our product.
Lunch and Learns
As a remote manager, fostering growth and connection within a product design team is a personal priority. At Paylocity, I organized team-building activities, delivered presentations, and hosted virtual happy hours to strengthen our team culture. The initiative I’m most proud of though is the evolution of our monthly UX Lunch and Learn events. Drawing from my experience in organizing tech and UX meetups, I introduced a quarterly guest speaker series, bringing in external experts to inspire and share insights with our team.
Low-Fi Standardization
While we were constantly tweaking our product design toolset at Paylocity, having a design system and UI toolkit made our high-fidelity prototyping fairly consistent. We presented design work to stakeholders early and often for feedback, which made sharing rough concepts and wireframes a common occurrence. In order to provide the same level of consistency to our low-fi work, I led an effort to push the majority of our early concept work over to Whimsical. To make our rapid prototyping even more rapid, I also recreated our UI toolkit as a Whimsical wireframe for designers to pull from.
