Enhancing Workflow Automation for HR Professionals

The workflow module was designed to help HR professionals automate and manage recurring processes, such as leave requests, approvals, and notifications. Its goal was to reduce manual work and make complex workflows easier to visualize and execute. When I joined the project, the module already had an initial set of designs inspired by Ramp, but it became apparent that improvements were needed to make it more intuitive—particularly for HR users who were less tech-savvy. To tackle this, I started with a structured approach combining usability audits, redesign strategy, and iterative testing.

Stage 1. Usability Audit

An audit was already set in motion by Abdullah Faisal (Product Manager) and it revealed significant areas for improvement, the most prevalent issue being that users that were less tech-savvy (as most HR professionals in Pakistan tend to be), had a difficult time setting up the workflow. The designs were simply not, user-friendly.

Stage 2. Design and Testing Strategy

I started off by formulating a redesign strategy for a simplified user flow that featured a Flowchart on an infinite canvas. Taking inspiration from Figjam and Intercom. This design allowed the user a lot more control and free-roam while creating their workflows and also allowed us to have two very distinct set of designs that were prototyped and iterated on many times. These designs were used for Bucket Testing and from this point onwards will be referred to as the Linear and Flowchart designs.

User Testing Plan

1. Diverse User Pool

It was essential that we tested this module with a diverse pool of users in order to cover different levels of tech experience and gain a more comprehensive idea of what to do and what not to do. This included:

• Tech-savvy HR pros: These would be users who are familiar with automated workflows already and can give more educated feedback on which design was more efficient.

• Non-tech-savvy users: These were the most important users in our research as they are the ones who would help us pinpoint the areas that might be confusing or overwhelming for those who do not use technology so frequently. 

• HR professionals from companies of different sizes: This demographic would help us get a range of feedback, it would be ideal to use both small and large businesses/organizations because this would present us with a variety of workflow needs.

2. The Test Case

The test case that was presented to the participants was inspired by a persona of a HR professional, who had to create a workflow for “Leave Requests” using both designs. The flow was the same, the requirements of the flow were:

1. The user had to first select the trigger, which in this case was that "a leave request was raised", when this happened, the Admin would be notified of all raised leave requests, irrespective of the department, location or role of the employee who raised it.

2. The user would then set a "Condition", this was the key differentiator between both designs. In the Linear Design, the users could create separate conditions where they could include "AND" and "OR" variables, for example, "if Department is Engineering AND Location is Lahore". It was here that I felt came the first limitation in the Linear design, in order to add "AND"/"OR" conditions here, the user had to create a new condition from scratch, which in my opinion was time consuming and not very intuitive. Hence, in the Flowchart Design that I proposed, I added the functionality of setting a "Main Condition" which in this case would be, "if Department is Engineering", and then the users could add branches or what I called "Sub Conditions", like "AND Location is Lahore, OR Location is Peshawar", giving them the freedom to accomplish more in a shorter amount of time.

Another key functionality of adding a Default Action was included in both designs as a fail-safe, to make sure that an incomplete link in the flow would not negatively impact the back-end development of the app. The default action was handled in different ways within both designs.