Bringing new hire onboarding into Paylocity's mobile app
Summary
Paylocity has a product called onboarding that its customers use to handle orientation and legally-required paperwork for their new hires. The onboarding product was only ever available as a web experience. I was asked to bring it into Paylocity's mobile apps for the first time as a native experience for iOS and Android.
Skills
SwiftUI prototyping, major feature design, international team collaboration, discovery, iOS and Android mobile design
Year
2023–2024
Discovery
This project landed on my desk as a feature request, not as a problem to solve. "We need Onboarding in the mobile app" was pretty much the ask. That describes the end goal, but doesn't give a designer much to work with.
I dug deeper in discovery to deconstruct what the real issues were, and documented my findings in a discovery deck that I shared with stakeholders and kept updated throughout the project.
Vision concepts
Vision work can be a waste of time if you're not careful about your goals. For this project, I skipped creating an extensive vision and instead built focused snapshots for the key concepts I identified during discovery.
Working with legacy constraints
The Onboarding web experience runs on one of Paylocity's oldest back-end systems. The catch the team had to deal with was that this same back-end had to power our new mobile experience, and we could only make minimal changes to it.
This meant that every time we wanted to create something new or different in the mobile app, we had to weigh the cost on the user of having it work differently than the web version.
Building a fresh, modern experience on top of rigid, legacy systems turned out to be one of the biggest challenges of the project.
Creating a consistent task experience
One major issue with the web version was that onboarding tasks were presented in wildly different ways. I created a full-screen modal framework that could gracefully handle all three types of tasks I found when auditing the web experience.
Conclusion
This project challenged me to balance what I wanted to do with what Paylocity was ready to do. While the legacy backend limited what we could change, we still delivered a mobile experience that felt modern and consistent, and differentiated from legacy Paylocity experiences.
Working within these constraints pushed me to be more creative with less. Instead of reinventing everything, I focused on creating a consistent framework that could handle different task types while still working with our existing systems.
The discovery phase was crucial for stakeholder alignment. By mapping out potential pitfalls early, we avoided time-consuming detours during development. The risk assessment section of my discovery deck surfaced issues that surely would have sidetracked the team later on.
The new onboarding flow launched to positive feedback from both employers and their new hires. Users particularly appreciated being able to complete onboarding tasks on their phones while on the go, instead of having to sit at a computer. Beyond just user satisfaction, the mobile onboarding experience acted as an effective onramp for overall mobile app adoption, leading to a significant increase in both new registrations and ongoing app utilization.