Define a clear, user-centred
leave and holiday vision
My role: Lead end to end experience vision • Strategy • Iterative UX design • User research • Co-design workshop • UX flow • Scalable pattern • Storytelling
Overview
UK Payroll Leave & Holiday feature doesn’t meet the needs of Xero simple small businesses (40%), impacting growth and retention. This also limits our ability to scale and support complex customers (1.2m).
Solution (What)
Design a differentiated and simple leave experience that scales to meets customers needs with embedded TAS, automation and AI
The problem (Why)
Opportunity
On average only 6.3% out of 73%*
(less than a quarter) of Xero Payroll customers use leave feature. Customers think the current experience is “nonsensical”, “challenging” and “confusing”
* 73%+ employ at least one employee
Create best in market leave & holiday feature that delights small businesses in the UK, increasing product utilisation from 6% to closer to 70%
CURRENT PRODUCT
Set up employee leave policy
CURRENT PRODUCT
Manage Leave
CURRENT PRODUCT
Set up leave
CURRENT PRODUCT
Set up holidays
The discovery (How)
Co-design customer workshop
Key findings
We conducted a 3-hour in person Co-Design workshop with 5 customers, mixture of small business owners, payroll/HR managers and Accountant/Bookkeepers using Xero Payroll, as well as other softwares such as Sage and other HR systems.
We asked customers to first identify pain points across the Leave & Holiday journey, then ideate solutions to those problems. Finally, they sketched their ideal solution using “Crazy 8s” and collaborated to design their ideal flow and solution.
Further validated the ‘basic’ expected features from customers:
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Organisation leave policies, including bank holiday management and organisation leave settings
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Easy management of employee level leave entitlement, including managing leave in days and weeks and roll over
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Basic reporting on employee leave entitlements and leave balances
Some complex features to better manage their leave & holiday:
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A leave calendar to manage employee leave requests and capacity
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Forecasting and analytics that enable customers to make informed actions on wellbeing
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Automated suggestions and insights on their leave data, such as alerts when an employee is going into negative balance or has a high leave balance
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An audit trail and update on employee’s leave
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Automatic creation of leave policies based on employee contracts
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Better integrations into HR systems
Vision journey map and IA
Following the workshop findings and designs, I mapped the end to end vision flow, from org and leave settings to day-to-day management and explored redefining the information architecture
The vision designs
With the ideal journey defined and initial sketches in place, I designed the end-to-end journey concepts in Figma. As part of the Leave & Holiday strategy, I presented this vision to leadership and stakeholders, highlighting the improved customer experience and the opportunity to shape the future of the Xero product.
As part of the project phasing, the team began delivery on the first, thinnest slice: managing leave in days, hours, and weeks.
Vision journey map (click to enlarge)
The Vision
User testing
The final simplified prototype for payslip automation was tested with users to validate ease of use and ensure the clarity of options for enabling automated payslips.
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Success metrics
Increase Engagement
Increase number of visits
Increase Adoption
Gain new users
Increase happiness
User satisfaction through a survey post launch
Kirti Devi Ram
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