B2B
cross-functional collaboration
entreprise SaaS
UX/UI
Vision
SHR is a human resources information system (HRIS) software enhanced by generative AI. Its comprehensive toolbox covers various facets of HR management namely administrative, time and attendance, talent, health & safety, and labor relations management.
Overview
As the founding UX consultant for the company, I spearheaded several rapid design improvements for the legacy version of an entreprise SaaS. My role involved auditing and prioritizing user experience recommendations within the constraints of an outdated front-end framework. While addressing immediate usability challenges, I also ensured that these changes aligned with the broader vision of a seamless transition to a revamped platform. This dual focus was critical, as the legacy and new solutions were set to coexist during the rollout, requiring thoughtful design strategies to maintain a cohesive user experience across both versions.
Challenge
With early discussions of a complete revamp of their SaaS gaining momentum, we agreed that before diving headfirst into the future of the solution, the current offering still had significant potential for improvement through heuristic evaluation—without altering or compromising the existing backend logic. Functionally, the platform has been reliably meeting business needs for 30 years. While startups often focus on a single aspect of HR, SHR excels in consolidating multiple modules into one comprehensive solution. However from the end-user’s perspective, it hasn’t aged well. Years of customer feature requests, scope creep, and insufficient knowledge transfer have contributed to a user experience riddled with questions like, “Is this another strange bug or a hidden feature?” As a result, the visual design and intuitive flow remain suboptimal.
Solution
Establishing priorities
With the help of our PowerBI expert analyst, we narrowed our focus to 8 screens of the app used by our biggest client (75k employees, ~12k active users/mo) which comprised of 80%+ of their global traffic. Incidentally, the same top screens for most other clients.
Conducting the evaluation
Armed with Nielsen’s top usability heuristics, I set out to identify usability problem areas and common patterns among the screens. All the long, validating with the engineering team if what was proposed would affect or render incoherent an element in a separate context. The evaluation and proposed improvements were implemented over the course of a quarter.
Documenting, logging the fixes & dev handoff
I created a DevOps board (SHR’s platform of choice for tracking backlogs) entirely dedicated to UX-related tickets. I structured Features and User stories to drive the changes and coordinated requirements with our frontend. Changes were communicated to our technical writer who documented all the changes in the help guides. An internal publication summarizing the changes was created to illustrate the evolution.
Outcome
Delight among our existing client base spread like wildfire. Most users responded positively, but all agreed that the experience felt faster, even though not a single line of code was added to affect performance speeds.
