Propel worked with ReadyTech, a leading Australian technology company that provides people-centric solutions across a wide range of sectors, including Education, Workforce Solutions, Government, Work Pathways, and Justice. With its commitment to helping customers navigate complexity, ReadyTech approached the Propel team to help them improve their payroll user experience for their clients in Australia and New Zealand. Propel was excited to take on this challenge and provide ReadyTech with a solution that meets their business and user needs.
Challenge
The existing platforms had inconsistent infrastructure and codebases, which led to multiple user identities across the platform. ReadyTech wanted to consolidate their existing mobile ESS functionality for their payroll software solutions. The objective was to provide a new UI and UX for a single point of entry user interface, gradually phasing-out the legacy infrastructure, and consolidating clients onto new cloud systems.
Solution
Visual design and brand alignment
ReadyTech's branding and desired impression on end-users were crucial factors in developing a successful solution for their payroll user experience. By extending their brand guidelines to create a set of colour variants and typography suitable for producing rich user interfaces, the team at Propel ensured sufficient contrast levels and support for dark and light UI modes which also aids in accessibility. This design language will provide a solid foundation for future digital products. The UI components were custom designed using overlapping best-practices from Material and iOS design guidelines, creating a platform-agnostic design approach suitable for cross-platform development.
Focusing on the user and usability
Core accessibility principles are the foundation for achieving a good user experience that runs deeper than mere aesthetics. This includes colour and contrast choices, scaling and spacing of elements, and the composition of UI micro-copy such as button and form labels. The team placed additional emphasis on making the most common tasks simpler to follow and kept the messaging simple and concise for errors and warnings. Combining two platforms into one solution posed challenges in UI complexity, user flows, and terminology, which were handled case-by-case to ensure unambiguous alternatives that worked for both platforms.
Product design
To gain a deeper understanding of the platforms they would be working with, the team at Propel conducted extensive research, including walkthroughs with experts at ReadyTech and their own exploration. Their team of skilled developers, led by an experienced Tech Lead, collaborated with a Product Manager, Business Analyst, and Product Designer to develop a successful product strategy and solution that met business and user needs while staying within carefully controlled scope, time, and budget constraints. Deliverables included application flows, low and high fidelity wireframes, and fully detailed prototypes, all constructed within Figma using a reusable library of components for scalability and flexibility. Rather than designing the entire application upfront, the team utilised an agile approach with continuous discovery, design, and validation through weekly product design sessions with ReadyTech and user feedback from regular beta testing.
Outcome
Propel's collaboration with ReadyTech has resulted in an outstanding user experience for their employee self-service payroll app platform. The team's emphasis on brand alignment ensured that the platform was not only functional but also aesthetically pleasing. The core accessibility principles implemented by Propel ensured that the product's design went beyond aesthetics to improve its usability. Propel has presented and assisted with understanding the design patterns and decisions made, empowering ReadyTech with a rich resource of detailed and scalable design artefacts for future expansion and success.
You can see more information about the app is available from our client at https://readytechworkforce.io/ready-people/
