Gusto is a provider of payroll and HR solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. By 2024, 70% of new Gusto customers were micro-businesses hiring their first 1–5 employees and my team's business goal was to offer HR tools to new employers. (Applicant tracking, and people management tools).
However, our HR tool adoption was low. I conducted interviews with 15 new employers to understand why.
By 2024, 70% of new Gusto customers were micro-businesses hiring their first 1–5 employees. Our business goal was to increase adoption of HR tools amongst this audience. However my team was seeing low adoption. An empathy study showed us why:
Most new employers recruited via personal networks and did not need our applicant tracking tools or performance management.
Newer employers felt burdened by complex government requirements when hiring. Worried about penalties, they looked to Gusto for clear guidance and support.
Without a centralized place for compliance, customers struggled to understand which tasks Gusto handled and which required their attention, leading to confusion and inaction.
Recognizing compliance as an emerging challenge for employers, I partnered with 2 project managers and 2 engineering teams to design an ML-powered Compliance Platform. We imagined a scalable framework to surface relevant compliance tasks and guides customers through necessary actions. We prioritized hiring-related use cases for initial impact and leveraged our existing notification system to ensure broad and effective delivery.
With my PM's input I mapped the main compliance requirements 0-5 employers face. We decided to start with compliance trainings in California, due to its opportunity size, complexity and Gusto's full control over the experience.
I focused on designing core awareness patterns for our compliance experience, trying to keep customers in a single context as much as possible to understand and act on compliance rules, but some of these explorations constrained the required real-estate needed to clearly communicate complex compliance rules.
When I tested concepts with potential customers, feedback revealed confusion around the three options we presented—complete through Gusto, outside of Gusto, or skip—as they didn’t clearly match user intent. Many preferred to simply dismiss the task to indicate “I’m not doing this,” so we later integrated that behavior into the experience.
To ensure scalability, I collaborated with our content writer and notifications team designer to come up with design principles for the messaging framework and compliance communication pattern, and an initiative to socialize and stress-test the new patterns across many different teams actively working on compliance.
With the feedback provided by other designers, we were able to tweak the patterns and create universal solutions.
In the final flow, I prioritized a clear and safe experience, highlighting Gusto as the best solution to accomplish a compliance task: Enroll employees in training. On the employee side, I put emphasis on using email notifications and our task system to let employees know when they were overdue or close to it, to help companies be fully compliant.
Within three months we consistently saw that 10 out of 12 employers who saw HR training compliance notifications acquired trainings for their team members.
After the MVP proved to be successful to make customers aware about compliance tasks, I partnered across domains to scale the system to other use cases, providing teams with office hours to review their flows, and making sure they used the design and content frameworks created during the MVP. These use cases spanned across benefits, additional HR courses nationwide, and payroll.
Each partnership included workshops, and flow reviews to align each team's messaging and use cases with the new system.
Once key teams onboarded their compliance use cases into the new engine, we identified the need for a centralized hub to house requirements, avoiding overload in the Home task system. I mapped the information architecture and defined the informational pieces we needed to bring customers from a Home tasks to the hub, and into in-product flows for understanding and acting on compliance.
Early explorations focused on organizing information, and making sure we set clear expectations on what customers needed to do, Vs. requirements already handled by Gusto.
Some options were: Organizing compliance by type (payroll, HR, benefits, recurrently handled by Gusto) or by a combination of urgency and State, which is an industry standard we wanted to follow.
In the final design tasks were organized across 3 tabs that separate active requirements from automated and completed requirements, where tasks were displayed by urgency. Supporting information like "next action by" gave high-level visibility of who owned the task, whether this was in the government's court, on the customer or on Gusto to do the next step.
As adoption of the compliance hub grew, it became a blueprint for proactive guidance across Gusto. Next steps included designing an authoring system for self-serve compliance rule creation (in planning).
This was the most complex cross-functional initiative I’ve led, involving multiple teams, systems, and stakeholders. It taught me how to align diverse teams around a shared product vision, build governance into ambiguous systems and deliver near-term results while designing for long-term scale.
Employers hire with confidence
Employers expressed awareness of how Gusto helps with compliance, also reflected in less customer support related calls.
Balanced user and business needs
These design initiatives balanced employer needs for guidance and compliance with Gusto's revenue and adoption goals.
72% task completion
72% of customers who see compliance requirements in Gusto take action on our platform.
