product design research

Project Product Design Research for an HR Compensation module
Design a Compensation module that integrates with the HR application and meets the needs of companies with under 20,000 employees.
Compensation module for HR application
Design a compensation module that allows an organization to follow their workflow and standards with a system that is easy to install and configure.
Research A baseline was set with general research on compensation through documents and books in the industry. Research into competitors by looking for potential partners gave insight into how other vendors approached the compensation problem. Further identification of the main personas and clarification of their roles and tasks helped create a picture for which we were designing the application. Additional research was performed by gathering together a customer advisory board (CAB).  This subset of customers provided onsite interviews and observations to demonstrate how they currently performed the compensation tasks. Additional conference calls and video-conferences were performed to clarify and validate the ideas and designs we were creating.
Analysis The product requirements document was created along with business use cases. I drove the system use cases “personas doing work in the system” to describe at a detailed level what the personas would be doing. This helps identify those things you are designing for and those that are not being done. The explicit delineation of use cases helps clarify the scope and resources needed for the project.
Deliverable The project was being designed to integrate with the existing HR application. I created a business object model to identify the things that exist in the system and their relationships. This diagrammed helps in designing the workflow and communicating to other team members what the design covers. Other documents created for the analysis were flow diagrams and user interface specifications. The flow diagrams showed how the user flowed through their tasks. The user interface specification brought most of the information together in one place with references to the product requirements document, use cases, screenshots, field description and state changes.

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