Payroll 01
Product design, Zeal

As founding designer, I was instrumental in building a reimagined payroll product from the ground up. The result was a 16x increase in weekly active users and a $1.5 million USD increase in daily processed monetary value.

About Zeal
As of spring 2024, Zeal︎︎︎is a Series B startup that provides medium to large businesses the ability to manage payroll and adjacent tasks for their employees. I joined Zeal when it was a Series A.

The payroll product we offered had been inadequately researched, leading to confusion and churn

Customers expected a payroll product similar to the ones they’d used before, but Zeal’s payroll was very different. In addition to poor foundational research, payroll also suffered from a lack of a design system, consistent user experience, and validation.

Competitor research helped us understand where we stood amongst competitors.

I then conducted interviews with customers who had previously managed payroll with competitors like Gusto, Rippling, and CheckHQ. I compiled their reasons for why they had churned and compared them with our findings and reasons why our previous customers churned, informing the team and I on next steps.

Design and behavior

Zeal lacked a cohesive design system when I joined in August 2022, limiting not only payroll but the product as a whole. I built the core foundation of this system alongside research and early design phases of payroll, which proved to be an effective pairing.

Our system was being tested on a core and complex feature that was also flexible enough to scale as we were realizing the product’s visual and behavioral complexity.

We wanted to establish patterns throughout the product to increase navigability and trust, and our design system quickly grew to accomplish that.

Language

Christina Glass︎︎︎, Zeal’s brand designer, and I teamed up to determine a consistent voice and grammar for all areas of the business, including both the marketing and product realm.

Adopting a clear, concise, and helpful language had shown to greatly improve navigability and trust, reducing ghost and rage clicks by 80% within 6 months of its full implementation.

Automation

Like our competitors, Zeal had an autopilot feature that would create checks at regular intervals based on a given pay frequency and salary amount. However, the way our autopilot feature was designed limits the automated checks to individual employees, not a group of them. In other words, customers could only run payroll effectively for one employee at a time.

Customers expect to run payroll for a group of employees, often separated by whether those employees should receive checks at regular intervals (regular payroll), or if they receive checks at irregular intervals or only once (off-cycle payroll).

To minimize the time, effort, and room for error in this process, we reframed how regular payroll runs should be conducted. Customers can now identify which employees should be included as part of regular payroll run, and run payroll at regular intervals while the system makes the individual checks for them.

Sukanya (soo-khan-ya) is a product designer and programmer whose varied experience spans founding design culture to scaling robust systems.

Previously at Stash, Zeal, and Commsor. Currently looking for new opportunities.