Leave Policy Builder
Client: ADP
Objective
It's a hassle to configure new leave policies. Often it's beyond the ability of a client and is handled by implementation consultants. ADP knows their sytem, but their clients know their policy rules the best. To make things more complicated, clients range dramatically in size from fewer than 10 employees to thousands. Add to that global compliance considerations, and it becomes an even more daunting a task. Our project aimed to simplify this process to support companies big and small all around the world with different local policies.
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LEGACY EXPERIENCE
The current experience was housed in a different system where implementation consultants would go in an manunally set up policies. There were multiple tabs where different information would be input with no linear flow. It took a lot of training to learn the system and it was still very error prone.
USER RESEARCH
Qualitative
60 min remote sessions
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30 min gernerative questions
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30 min concept test
20 HR practitioners
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Across 5 countries
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Managed L&A for multinational companies
Objectives
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Identify areas of opportunity that could differentiate ADP in the global L&A policy space.
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Learn how practitioners are managing and maintaining leave policies for 2+ countries and how they mentally model this process.
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Identify pain points around setting up different leave policies for multinational companies, and learn their downstream impact.
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Test the usability of a policy creator concept design.
Key Findings
Federated Model
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How might we help practitioners learn about and decipher legislative changes in multiple countries?
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Out of the Box Compliance
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How might we make clear where and how compliance is baked in and/or incorporate more compliance features?
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Self-Service Modeling
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How might we integrate the policy text or that mental model into the tool?
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How might we enable practitioners to test a policy as part of the configuration experience?
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Global Insights
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How might we surface data about impact and urgency that empowers practitioners to make decisions about policies?
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Self Service Enablement
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How might we make practitioners feel supported and confident completing a process that has high stakes impacts?
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How might we include change management elements within the configuration process?
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How might we connect payroll reports to policy configuration or make payroll audits unnecessary?
USER FLOW
Today, a lot of the user flow happens offline, as shown below in purple. HR profressionals’ mental model for the “policy” is the text that goes in the employee handbook; however, the system rules need to be configured to actually apply the policy when an employee makes a leave request.
CONCEPT TEST
For the second half of the hour sessions, we spent 30 minutes conducting a concept test. We wanted to create something that was scalable and customizable. We came up with this system of what we called “LEGO blocks”. The LEGO blocks would be rules that users could drag and drop into their policy configuration as needed. They could group them in endless combinations. This would allow us to easily scale as new client or compliance requirements came up.
Key Findings | Recommendations |
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Most didn't read instructional text, | Known issue that users don't read. Make instructional text purposeful but don't rely on it. Rely more on intuitive interactions and prompts, coach marks, training of tool |
Most didn't see rule grouping but said they would use a feature to group rules. | Redesign how to give rule grouping visual salience as well as make it clear the purpose. |
Some confused about "Section" vs "Rule" | Work with content strategy on clear, organized labels for organization of content within s polley Investigate vis further user research (c.g. card sort). |
Some said they weren't sure if the rule would added if they used CTA. | Further usability testing or the adding new rule interaction is needed with workable prototype |
Most who failed had an issue with the Rule Library, mainly not seeing the right-hand side column. Most also expected to be able to take these actions on the last page Some said they weren't sure where the rule would be added if they used CTA. | Fight pattern blindness through purposeful color usage, hierarchy of content, limiting mental loads, animation, etc... |
Most didn't appear to connect Required to compliance many expected Elgibility first | Investigate via further research (eg. card sort) order of sections in template and expected content for each section. Figure out how to visually highlight to the user baked in compliance. |
If practitioners failed, it was because they: Expected to put in details/rules from this page, or thought Next CTA would lead to the policy text or summary screen | Rethink user flow and consider combining steps. Think more "tool" and less "wizard stepped process". |
If practitioners struggled or failed, it was because they clicked on Create New Policy Type CTA. Some unclear about what 'Configure' means. Some didn't click on Italy. | Work with content strategy on clear actionable CTAs Consider carrying through country identifiers through the whole process. |
Many were confused about Status or Confidence | Rethink what information is most important to be included in the table summary view, and consider adding information icons and tool tips. |
Most understood the tool was for creating policies but some were confused about who and what it was for | Consider creating a blank state for first time users with clear and actionable CTA |
PIVOT POINT
A major pivot happened in the project. We were asked to concentrate on our small business clients first, as opposed to our large whom we looked at for research. The are clients with 0-50 employees, and the vast majority of them have 10 clients or less. They don’t need all the bells and whistles. They often offer the bare minimum to be compliant with their local governance.
Furhtermore, to build the “LEGO blocks” was a multi-year roadmap. What do we do now? How can we make the bare minimum self-service interface, know where we eventually want to go and taking the learnings from our research? We know there’s a lot more beyond the policy set up that is currently happening offline, such as approval flows and messaging impacted employees of policy changes. Can we bring the whole user flow online and streamline it?
MVP SOULTION
We took the users’ mental model of “policy” being text in their employee handbook to create a super simple self-service interface while continuing to leverage our implementation consultants in the background to configure the policy rules for MVP.
We brought other areas of the user flow online such as the approvals process and notifying impacted employees of policy changes as well as a version history managment feature.
