Wave Financial's Payroll Onboarding
Making it simple for small businesses to get started with Payroll on Wave Financial
About the project
In 2017, I was the Product Designer for Wave's new payroll onboarding experience. Wave is used by thousands of small businesses across Canada and U.S. to run payroll, pay employees and file payroll taxes.
The problem
Setting up a business to run payroll with Wave was a disconnected, laborious and convoluted process — resulting in sizeable support tickets and overall low adoption of the software's best features. The user flow below shows just how cumbersome setup could be.
Uncovering the pain points
We began by interviewing new users about the current onboarding experience. We also reviewed Support Tickets and consulted in house Tax Specialists and Risk team to understand common issues with new users.
7 Discoveries
1) Users don't know what Wave will take care of for them
2) Users don't know how to opt into Tax Service
3) Users have difficulty setting up Direct Deposit
4) Users don't know they should add payroll history
5) Users find setup process lengthy
6) Users don't know about incomplete steps
7) Users don't know when they're ready to run payroll
Running a Design Sprint
As the lead designer, I facilitated a 1-Day Design Sprint involving Stakeholders, Customer Support, Product developers, and Product owners. I modelled the sprint activities after Google's Sprints. Domain experts gave lightning talks, and the team did multiple rounds of brainstorming and sketching.
Defining our UX Goals
1) Educate users about features and simplify opt-in
2) Tailor the setup based on user needs
3) Organize steps for ease of completion
4) Communicate the status of setup
5) Clarify tax-related questions during setup
Process and artifacts
Discovery: User Interviews → Design Sprint
Understand: Journey Map → User Flows → Information Architecture
Solve: Wireframes → Technical Writing → UI Design & Illustrations
Test & Launch: Prototypes → User Testing → Build → QA
Four parts of the journey
1) Payroll needs
Educate users about features and provide greater access to turn options on or off.
2) Custom Hub
A place to see all steps in the setup and status of each step
3) Setup Forms
Simplified forms with in-line clarifications & support
4) Payroll Dashboard
See the status of features on the dashboard before running payroll
Illustrations and Graphics
The result
After the launch of the new onboarding experience, we succeeded in increasing active users using Tax Service, reduced the number of days it took to complete full payroll onboarding and reduced onboarding-related support tickets by 15%.
