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Rebuilding payroll

Founding designer, 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 as its founding designer when it was a Series A, where I was instrumental in developing its design foundation, including its star product, payroll.

The result was a 16x increase in weekly active users and a $1.5 million USD increase in daily processed monetary value within 6 months post-launch.

The payroll product we offered had been inadequately researched, leading to confusion and churn.
The product team, including myself, had our suspicions as to why this was the case. Despite Zeal owning a suite of money movement products, only Payroll had been designed, however informally.

We also had to consider a painpoint specific to Zeal: the feature could only run payroll on a check by check basis. This, in addition to a poor front-end experience, was causing customers to churn.

Fig.1: This was the extent Zeal’s payroll design, which provides an oversimplified, linear payroll journey with limited user validation or support. Visually, it is low contrast and hard to read.

Fig. 2: This was the extent of Zeal’s product design system, which did not meet the needs of a complex software like payroll.

We conducted competitor research to understand how payroll could be solved.
As a B2B company, my team and I did not have direct communication with end users, so we made the most we could by scraping blogs, YouTube videos, and other content to get the best picture we could of our competitors.

Fig. 3: A look into our research on Gusto. We conducted research by finding whatever images of competitor products as we could, mapping them out and annotating them accordingly.

Based on these findings, the product team and I determined that in order for Zeal to be competitive in the market, both payroll’s front- and back-end needed to be redesigned.
We pitched our ideas within a Product Requirements Doc, which outlined a three-pronged solution:

Streamlining the payroll experience

The original payroll experience forced users to operate linearly, not accounting for potential errors or navigation mistakes. As we strategized how to re-architect payroll, we considered ways in which we could streamline this experience in a way that didn’t leave users feeling trapped.

We also needed to prioritize an experience that provided a technically feasible MVP. We had to take into account a limited engineering bandwidth due to their focus on making check processing more efficient.

Streamlining the payroll experience

The original payroll experience forced users to operate linearly, not accounting for potential errors or navigation mistakes. As we strategized how to re-architect payroll, we considered ways in which we could streamline this experience in a way that didn’t leave users feeling trapped.

We also needed to prioritize an experience that provided a technically feasible MVP. We had to take into account a limited engineering bandwidth due to their focus on making check processing more efficient.

Fig. 4: We annotated current screens to gauge areas of improvement.

Fig. 5: The readability of many screens within payroll could be immensely improved by maintaining consistent layouts.

Fig. 6: Separating flows within payroll helped us map where things led and take note of redundant and misleading steps.