User Experience Principles in Action

Q&A Series With PeopleDoc’s Head of UX Nicole Harris

This post is the third in a three-part series about PeopleDoc’s UX. To read the first post, click here.

I recently sat down with PeopleDoc’s Head of UX, Nicole Harris, to learn more about PeopleDoc’s approach to user experience. In this post, we explore the process behind updating PeopleDoc’s user interface.

What was the process for creating the PeopleDoc UI?

We aren’t the first organization to develop a design system, and won’t be the last – so our first step was to research how other organizations have approached the same problems. We also spent time auditing our existing interfaces to understand what we need, what could go and what we wanted to keep.

Further technical research was carried out to decide what technology we should use to build the design system. In parallel, we started to design a new visual identity to give us a starting point for building our components.

Components and layouts were then built and validated with our product owners. User tests of new interfaces were also carried out to confirm that we were on the right track.

Currently we are in the process of integrating several new design system interfaces into our products – this involves working closely with our product teams and continuing to act on feedback from our users.

PeopleDoc UI will never be finished – it must evolve and improve to respond to our users, new features and changing technology.

You are currently rolling out PeopleDoc UI across each of the PeopleDoc solutions. What is going to be better?

From a pure branding perspective, our solutions will begin to look more similar, which will help us present a more unified platform. The visual design itself is also updated, with many of our test users reacting positively to the new look and feel.

From a user experience perspective, users will begin to benefit from much more robustly tested interface design, and as a result should find new and redesigned pages more intuitive.

The plan is to rollout the new design gradually, allowing time to collect and respond to user feedback. I’m very excited about this; closer collaboration with our users helps us build better products – which in turn, helps our users to be better in their work.