Launched Q2, 2024 / Vision / Web / Lead designer
Making Homebase Payroll’s setup flows and processes easy and magical for new payroll customers
Homebase is platform providing a sleuth of tools to help SMBs’ success—one of which is Payroll. Proactively identifying this problem at my other role, I prioritized this effort to be put on the roadmap. I gained buy-in across Ops, Sales, Product, Design, and leadership. As a result, our redesigned user journey had impressive outcomes:
Initiatives doubled more than 50% user completion rates, CES score, and decreased time to task by 90%.
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
6 months (Jan - Jun 24’)
Core responsibilities
Product strategy, Product design, User research
Problem
Business owners struggle to complete payroll setup without help and human intervention from our internal teams, leading to user frustration and bottleneck of Ops team
Homebase’s business modal is a “pick-and-choose your feature”. That means, users can opt-in or opt-out of Payroll. As we’ve grown YoY, so has our user base and interest for Homebase Payroll.
When a user decides to opt into Homebase, there’s a series of “somewhat setup” flow. However, the setup flow has been very outdated. It has not been updated since Payroll first launched in 2019. Answers inputted are irrelevant, as an example. Our saving grace was our Payroll Operations team. They’ve been doing the heavy lifting to get our users to finish setup.
Unfortunately, user base has outgrown our Ops team. As a result, the challenge for the team was to make the product more remarkable before focusing on new user growth.
Goals
Increase ease of setup for users, while ensuring accuracy and timeliness before owners’ first payroll run with Homebase
Leadership’s ask was to decrease “Ops bandwidth”. I spearheading the collaboration with Ops, Product, CX, and Growth.
Our goal was to simplify the setup process, making “setup ridiculously easy”. This would lead to increased users going through the setup funnel, shorter completion rates, less Ops bandwidth, ultimately being able to save Homebase from growing the Ops team.
Solution
Move away from one-size-fits-all payroll setup flow, providing personalized experiences depending on business owners
As we learned about our users and the product, our team managed to provide an experience that’s dynamic and tailored to the user dependent upon where the user is coming from, how much the user can provide info, and making help readily available to them—hence changing our product strategy from a pull to push mechanism.
Dynamic payroll setup forms
Meeting our users where they were at, e.g. asking them whether they’ve paid their team before
Continuously providing in-product help mechanisms where users need it
There’s nothing like improved UX writing, usage of components, and overall clarity in design.
Below is before VS after.
37% user base growth in 4 months, cut down time to task by 90%, ultimately moving 3 Operations folks to grow other net new features
Result
These outcomes were achieved after 6 months of work, with the final milestone still pending.
Process / Research
Business owners’ payroll setup journey takes up to 10 business days and 4 Homebase team members to support each step of the process
Building and maintaining a Service Blueprint has helped me understand the connection between the Operations team doing the setup process out-product, and how it reflects in-product. Additionally, it has started becoming clear to me of the pain points and grievances throughout the process by each player.
Business owners’ level of understanding in payroll, sense of urgency, and stage of business vary, affecting time-to-task, support level, and ultimately user experience
Knowing we had little to no repository from past teams (we’re the first team) , I kick-started a generative research plan that spanned across different UX methods and efforts including the following:
Competitive analysis
Post-setup user interview plan
Shadowing conversations about setup
Continual touch base with sales + ops
Initially rejected, our vision to create a self serve setup process for business owners gained buy-in after rounds of in-product experiments
Process / Internal learnings
Our operations team consisted of 12 folks working to get our business owners payroll ready. Having self-serve means that our Ops team can’t properly guide our users to provide accurate documents.
We launched a series of experiments:
DIY VS Ops experiment: Users choose to populate their own setup and the time to task around that VS letting our Ops team chime in
“Willingness to upload” fake door test: Quick test to see if users are able to upload required documents without building upload components
A/B testing—what instructions work best?: What level of help in-product will help steer users into providing correct documents?
Process / Ideation
Exploring how we might build an thoughtful onboarding process via designing with emotion
In collaboration with our Content designer, Design systems lead, and other XFN partners, I explored various ideas on what the “ideal” onboarding state will look like, and how to arrive towards it.
New patterns contributed back to both Design System and content guidelines.
🔒 Figma (protected)
Process / Visioning
Creating a painless, user-centric and accessible* payroll setup experience, so that a user can setup payroll where ever, when ever, how ever.
*Accessible in the context of using any kinds of device—Homebase app, third-party integration, and so forth.
I co-led a 2-day Design Thinking session along with my Product Manager to level-set expectations with XFNs, as to what we’re building for H1 and H2 of 2024. Aside from a fruitful conversation, I had influenced cross-functional teams to get buy-in on our vision.
Operating in a very “hypothesis” heavy team, I divided our priorities into three different buckets
Process / Plan of action & prioritization
Process / Prototype
Enjoy this prototype—I tried rendering it as a GIF :-)
Though this project was a success (I’ll give myself a pat on the back for being able to influence XFNs!), learning be more comfortable in my role to ask the right questions, challenge stakeholders, and have more conviction to do the right thing can definitely be improved.
Improving my ability to influence XFN teams through empathy
Conclusion
