Enterprise payroll + AI
Turning fragmented payroll workflows into one intelligent operational experience.
Designed a unified payroll experience that brought readiness, exceptions, required actions, and decision support into one operational workspace—helping payroll administrators understand what needed attention and move toward payroll completion with greater clarity and control.
Challenge
Payroll administrators were managing one critical process across disconnected systems.
My role
Principal Product Designer
Product strategy · UX research · Experience architecture · Interaction design · AI experience design · Prototyping · Validation
The challenge
Enterprise payroll requires administrators to monitor readiness, resolve exceptions, reconcile data, complete required actions, and ensure employees are paid accurately and on time.
Those responsibilities were distributed across disconnected applications, inconsistent workflows, and manual validation processes—making it harder to understand overall payroll readiness and determine what required attention.
My role
Synthesized existing research and customer feedback, partnered with Product and Engineering on experience strategy, mapped the end-to-end payroll journey, and designed and validated a unified interaction model for payroll operations and AI-assisted guidance.
Key decisions
The experience was organized around what payroll administrators needed to understand and accomplish—not around the boundaries of the underlying applications.
01
Rather than requiring payroll administrators to understand which underlying system owned each task, we organized the experience around what they needed to know and do to get payroll ready. That shifted the mental model from navigating products to completing payroll.
02
Instead of making administrators search across workflows to understand what needed attention, we brought exceptions, status, and required actions together so they could quickly identify issues and decide what to address next.
03
For less frequent or higher-complexity payroll tasks, guided experiences broke the work into understandable steps, clarified what information was required, and kept progress visible throughout the workflow—while payroll decisions stayed with the administrator.
The solution
The unified payroll experience brought readiness, exceptions, required actions, and payroll status into a shared workspace. Administrators could see where payroll stood, identify what needed attention, resolve issues, and move toward completion without navigating across disconnected systems.
01
A unified view surfaces payroll status, key indicators, exceptions, and the actions requiring attention.
02
Recommended resolutions for payroll exceptions are reviewed in context—with confidence, reasoning, and history—so administrators can resolve or reject them individually or in bulk and keep payroll moving without losing their place.
Impact
Simplified
Consolidated workflows
Fragmented payroll workflows consolidated into one operational experience.
Visible
Operational clarity
Payroll readiness, exceptions, and required actions surfaced in context.
Validated
Evaluated before build
Experience concepts evaluated with payroll administrators, stakeholders, and customer feedback before implementation.
Foundation
Experience architecture
Experience architecture established for future AI-assisted payroll workflows.
The goal wasn't to add AI to payroll. It was to make a fragmented, high-stakes process easier to understand, manage, and complete with confidence.