Directory consolidation
Create a unified ecosystem between all 4 Justworks products to provide an end-to-end customer experience.
Role
Create team alignment by leading conversations that aligned product, engineering, and design on a shared vision.
Co-created solutions with stakeholders, navigating experience goals and technical realities through iterative design.
Mapped the experience by auditing all four products to uncover gaps and dependencies, paving the way for a unified experience.
Impact
1 unified experience that ladders into the company’s main strategic pillar - unification.
Consistent experience customers can learn and adopt as they transition between adopt.
Unblocked teams & helped to enable further launches towards company’s primary objective.
Laying the groundwork for a unified people experience
When Justworks set its sights on moving from a collection of products to a seamless service experience, the first domino to fall was navigation. A new global nav would reshape how customers moved through the platform—but only if the spaces it connected felt unified.
The People space, the company-wide directory, existed in four different forms across four different products. Bringing it together into one cohesive experience wasn’t just housekeeping—it was the key to unlocking the new navigation and laying the foundation for a truly connected Justworks.
ASO
PEO
EOR & ICP (shows inside the PEO)
Uncovering the landscape
Before we could design a unified People space, we needed to understand the terrain we were working with. I conducted an audit of all four existing products. One known quantity was the products pulled their data from four+ different databases. This revealed more than just fragmented databases; it exposed usability gaps and UI inconsistencies.
By creating visual artifacts that mapped these differences, I was able to make risks tangible, highlight dependencies, and spark alignment on what needed to change and what was technically feasible in short increments. These artifacts became a shared reference point for tackling challenges like information hierarchy, prioritizing feature consolidation, and shared understanding of technical limitations based on the systems or other team dependencies.
Seeing through the users’ eyes
Admins and employees see the People space through different lenses—so we asked them about it. In two rounds of research, we learned what each cared about most, from how they search for people to the details they want at a glance. A card sorting exercise helped us separate the “must-see-now” info for the People page from the deeper details that belong in a profile. These insights became the blueprint for balancing simplicity with depth across the experience.
Managers care about:
Employee's work location
What role they have
If they are a full-time employee, part-time employee, or contractor
If someone is out of office
Are they fully onboarded, still onboarding, or terminated
Employees care about:
What role they have
What department
If someone is out of office
From insight to iteration
Research insights shaped our early concepts, but iteration and alignment brought them to life. Weekly review sessions with product and engineering allowed us to present prototypes, gather feedback, and address technical constraints in real time. Visual change logs and clickable demos made progress transparent, sparked important follow-up conversations, and ensured every round of iteration moved us closer to a cohesive, technically feasible People experience.
Learning from launch
The first version of the unified People space successfully merged ASO and PEO experiences and rolled out to 100% of ASO customers. However, when expanded to 20% of PEO users, unexpected bugs forced a rollback. The root cause was traced to differences in databases and the adjustments PEO required to match ASO, highlighting the complexities of consolidating systems with uneven infrastructure.
This experience underscored the importance of anticipating backend dependencies and informed how we approached subsequent releases.
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