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In September 2020, Workday launched Pay On-Demand, which gives employees the ability to request earned wages ahead of their regular payday at no additional cost. I was the UX researcher on the Pay On-Demand team comprising of design, product, and engineering.
The purpose of this work was to understand customers’ mental models of Pay On-Demand and to gather design feedback. Since it is a payroll feature, it was especially important to balance the expectations of both the payroll administrators and employees. There were 3 rounds of research (where I conducted interviews and concept testing) and design.
After each round of research, I worked with our lead designer Youna Choi to determine and show the most critical information in the designs. The research informed decisions such as 1) removing an approval process for payroll administrators and 2) limiting Pay On-Demand requests to just the current pay period. An approval process would have added to administrators' workloads and led to longer pay delivery times for employees. Making requests available across multiple pay periods would have increased the amount of pay available for Pay On-Demand requests. However, fluctuations in the available amount (due to payroll processes I won’t dive into here) caused too much confusion to make having more pay available a worthwhile trade-off.
The UX team successfully delivered the designs for an early adopter launch of Pay On-Demand in September 2020 (see HERE for a launch blog post). Reflecting upon this project, I would have prioritized involving our engineers earlier in our process. With their later involvement, getting buy-in for our final designs was more difficult, since they lacked context on already completed work.