Humanely HR
Problem Statement and Overview
The primary objective is to design a solution that makes managing large teams easier.
Human Resource Administrators (HR Admins) are responsible for maintaining detailed information about the employees that work at their company. Frequently, the HR Admin needs to update a few details about a single employee. For example, when an Employee gets married, the HR Admin needs to update their last name, address, and marital status. Less frequently, the HR Admin needs to make changes to one or two details for multiple employees. For example, once a year everybody in the company receives a raise, and the HR Admin needs to change everybody’s salary.
Company Size
10-500 Employees
Technical Considerations
It is impossible to load hundreds of employees and meet our performance goals. We need a solution that does not load more than 100 employees at a time.
Request
Design a solution that allows HR Admins to access and manage details about their employees in a quick and easy manner. The solution must be able to demonstrate the following use cases:
Change the last name, address, and marital status of a single employee
Change the salary information for everyone in the company
Design Considerations
Responsive design: must work on mobile devices and desktop
Must be able to work for companies with 10-500 employees
Must reflect technical considerations
Project
I was asked to design a responsive website that addresses a pain point in the current HR system. After extensive research, I chose a design that targets the difficulties of managing large teams and how to do so in terms of ease and efficiency.
Responsive Web Design
Interaction Design
Branding /Art Direction
Design Process
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80% of businesses use HR software
HR software is incredibly useful for finding and retaining talent, onboarding and tracking employee performance. [1]
The first step was to clarify the problems HR Admins face when managing teams, by conducting both primary and secondary research. Primary Research included speaking directly with HR Admins and sending out surveys to help quantify responses. Secondary Research included, reading reviews of various HR management platforms online; looking into solutions from competitor applications; and researching HR management trends and problems that are already being discussed in the news and industry specific media.
Sources [1] Capterra
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It became immediately clear that Human Resource Management is a complex area with no shortage of problems. It seemed that every piece of research unearthed some new issues. However, we did hear a some repeat patterns:
1) 36% of HR professionals say they don’t have adequate technology
Without the right technology, you’re unable to automate processes, meaning you’re wasting time you could be spending on more important tasks such as training or onboarding.[2] Current software used in HR departments are confusing especially when onboarding new employees or updating many employees at one time. This is especially problematic in larger departments and those with higher turn over, where employees come in and out frequently.
2) Admins need to be efficient with their time.
3) When viewing employee information/ writing notes, Admins need to be able to pull up a variety of information such as marital status, past notes, and company enrollments.
4) Electronic record access requires a training in order to properly use, which can be costly and time consuming. The goal should be to keep the learning curve low for Admins.
5) Many companies have too many people in their HR department, as the average HR to staff ratio is 2.57. The average ratio goes up to 3.4 for small organizations, then down to 1.22 and 1.03 for medium and large organizations, respectively. There should be 1.4 HR staff for every 100 employees. Proper management tools would help bring this number in range.
6) Sixty percent of HR leaders say developing their management team’s effectiveness is a part of their strategy to improve the future of work in 2023.[3]
7) Contingent workers will continue to increase in 2023 creating more complex management flows.
Currently, 35% of the workforce is freelancers or contractors, accounting for $1.3 trillion in revenue. In total, there are 51.5 million contingent workers.[4]
Sources [2] Investopedia, [3] Gartner, [4] Staffing Industry
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Based on our research we created a qualitative persona for the Human Resources Administrator. At this stage it became clear that addressing the needs of larger teams (over 500 employees) would be the main challenge of this project. Especially in healthcare /government sectors where information about customers is uniquely private and protected, we knew the types of information displayed to these stakeholders would be more challenging.
User Flows /and journey maps
When first constructing user flows /and journey maps we discovered that filtering ability was essential when dealing with larger teams dealign with 500 or more employees. Employees are organized by company, department, and contractors /part time labor pages.
Each page can load up to100 employees at a time, at which point we can implement either,
Lazy load 100 more employees, or
Customized table pagination
Takeaways
Quality over quantity
It’s far too easy to over complicate solutions. This project took what I knew about designing data tables for enterprise clients further with an ask for responsive solutions. Designing for data is never simple and requires the designer to be an expert in funneling the correct data through a customized UI. The greater extent the user has to create a tailored experience, the better your solution becomes at serving their unique needs.
