Payroll Ecosystem Redesign
Stabilizing the backlog of pay-related issues impacting federal employees
Overview
Existing systems have caused thousands of delays and inaccuracies in pay and benefits for the government of Canada. At IBM, I helped design MyGCPay, a web-based ecosystem addressing these issues.
Applicable Links
1) Design an experience for pay error identification
2) Offer a simple view of HR and pay-related data
3) Consolidate valuable data from legacy systems
I was initially onboarded to improve the pay info dashboard. My role evolved to lead designer and I managed the design direction across other product areas: Manager Dashboard, HR Systems Integration, Virtual Chat & Live Agent Support, AI Policy Search Engine.
Liam Lawlor, Lindsay Reynolds, Julie Bock, Nour Al-Safi, Laila Abou
the Pre-work
We tackled the pay issues from a human-centred data perspective. The project scope was initially ambiguous and required groundwork. We got our hands dirty working with messy data.
Research
Stakeholder interviews across 5 federal departments
Conducted 154 contextual inquiries with public servants
Developed 6 personas based on research insights
Conducted ongoing usability studies
I conducted ethnographic observations of various federal employees in their workflows by capturing data from disparate systems and mapping them to specific actions.
Strategy
Faciltiated workshops with business and technical teams
Developed a roadmap based on prioritized user stories
Drafted service blueprints for relevant product areas
Held after in-depth departmental interviews, organization-wide workshops helped bridge silos by uncovering information flows and gaps in interdepartmental relationships — as well as aligned stakeholders on key pain points.
analyzing systems data
I collaborated with data scientists to contextualize and refine raw pay and HR data from disparate systems into a usable state. This required answering the following questions: How was this data being used? What's missing? What systems were involved? This process was important for capturing both technical and design requirements.
A data architecture diagram was made to visualize the data requirements for each wireframe of the manager dashboard, which involved building data pipelines and developing the backend system.
pain points
Our research revealed a domino effect: pay issues trickled downstream starting from managers to pay triage agents.
Managers have limited insight into job records. Errors were a result of incomplete information across disparate systems from the manual compilation of contract details and pay data. Silos across organizations and systems exacerbated these issues.
Employees and their managers couldn’t see compensation in advance nor track the status of an open pay issue. Employee calls to the help desk overwhelmed staff.
Pay triage agents strenuously navigated pay and HR-related documents, including policies and procedural forms.
SOLUTION: at a glance
There was a lot of problem-solving — but to keep things simple, here is a summary of key experience upgrades:
ITERATIONS
Data visualization was not always smooth sailing — in fact, I encountered technical challenges that required brainstorming, iteration, and negotiations with developers.
Optimizing keyboard accessibility
We initially used a table layout for the pay history to improve accessibility, but screen readers read out too much information at once without a clear hierarchy.
To address this, we switched to a list format, allowing users to tab through each paystub individually before hearing its associated details.
The numbered sequence below shows the order in which users can navigate the content using the "Tab" key and how it is read by a screen reader.
Impact
MyGCPay contributed to ongoing efforts of preventing and resolving pay issues within the public service sector
10-15% reduction in pay issue tickets
30% increase in pay case processing
Successful roll-out to 300,000 federal employees
Repurposed data from a shelved project and turned it into a 0→1 design project
Most importantly, support from users!
kept us going!
After the first roll-out, MyGCPay was met with a lot of buzz. We received over-pouring support from both users and leadership.
We could not have done it without the trust and collaborative efforts of our public servants.