Continuous Learning and Improvement of Payroll for Growing Businesses

The Problem

The bulk actions feature is designed for growing businesses with more employees to help them manage payroll items more efficiently and easily.

I have noticed that this feature has not been tested for usability, findability, and discoverability to make sure it meets users’ expectations and needs.

How can we know if this feature meets users’ expectations and needs by observing their attitudes and behavior through user research?

Hypothesis 1

Users can find and discover bulk actions when managing payroll items.

If I let customers organize bulk action tasks related to payroll using the existing sidebar menu as categories,

Then we can see where they think to associate these tasks in the sidebar

Which we will measure by observing how participants group the tasks.

I will know this to be true if participants use the existing categories or make a new one in common.

Hypothesis 2

Bulk actions for the creation and updating of payroll items is usable, findable, and discoverable.

If we get users to manage multiple employees payroll with bulk actions through user testing.

Then they will have a better experience in managing payroll with ease and efficiency.

Which we will measure by observing how participants completed their tasks.

Success metric will be if users complete their tasks, and they rate their overall experience in perofrming these tasks as completed confidently and with ease.

Research

  • Card Sorting

    I asked participants to group payroll tasks using categories modeled after the app’s current menu labels to see if they could find the new feature.

  • Unmoderated Usability Testing

    I tested the developed feature with customers, watching them perform bulk actions on payroll. I focused on tasks related to findability, usability, and discoverability.

  • Post Task Questionnaire

    I asked participants to rate how easy and confident they felt when doing bulk actions.

Findings

  • Bulk editing isn’t its own activity but a UI feature that speeds up tasks. Users link bulk editing to categories by information scent

    e.g. e.g. If users want to perform a task in adding a health benefit to 10 employees, they may look first at the menu item called Benefits.

  • Current customers edit payroll details on the Employees and Contractors pages, where they are likely to find bulk actions for these tasks. These pages are the 2nd and 3rd most visited in QuickBooks Online Payroll.

  • During tests, users performing bulk actions experienced friction due to findability issues. This was demonstrated by their need to navigate several pages to complete the task, which took a significant amount of time.

Design Considerations: Implementing Design Solutions

Access points

Provide access to Employee page where payroll management is currently conducted by user base.

Why? This is where successful task completions in bulk actions was performed through user testing.

Establish in-product discovery components

Make sure there is support to navigate to this new feature by enhanced awareness through product discovery components in QuickBooks design system.

Why? Because users who conduct day to day work in the app will most likely not be aware of the new feature.

Modular

Make this feature available for users in areas where they most likely look for it using a full page modal instead of a page.

Why? So that product teams can optimize feature access to users effectively anywhere in the app where users expect.

The Solution:
Modular Bulk Actions for Payroll Item Management

Feature is primarily accessed in page where payroll management is primarily conducted with flexibility to access it anywhere as a full page modal when needed. Because there was so many payroll items users can manage, I needed to provide detailed comps to the Product team in terms of interaction and various use cases including edge cases.