Google: gpayslips
The Core UX team at Google works on a lot of products — more than 300 of them. With limited resources, many of those products don’t get the attention they deserve. A few of us decided to identify one of them for a hackathon, a three-day sprint with a small, diverse team. We found the perfect candidate in gPayslips.
The Challenge
To view their paystubs, Google employees outside of the U.S. use gPayslips. Created in 2014, this single-serve app had never been updated. Users found the experience frustrating, with unhelpful content, difficult-to-find support, and no explanation for Googlers who accidentally landed on the site.
My Role
Research and discovery
Content strategy
Ideation
UX writing
The Approach
Our team was made up of myself (UX writer), two UX designers, and a UX engineer. With just a few days to work, we created different work streams to write UI text and re-skin the existing experience, implement our changes, and ideate future features. Here’s how we planned our time:
Day 1: Unpack, define, and ideate. We learned as much as we could about the product and its users, defined an addressable list of problems, heard from scheduled speakers, and began ideation.
Day 2: Ideate and decide. We generated potential solutions to problems and defined a short- and long-term deliverable.
Day 3: Execute. We designed, wrote, and coded. We also assembled a deck to share with our business stakeholders.
before and after the sprint
The existing tool consisted of a table with content that wasn’t particularly helpful. For example, it lacked an explanation of what the tool does, showed long PDF file names, and had a confusing acknowledgement process for users in several countries (more on this later). We updated the design with the latest design system, rewrote the text to make it more personable, and surfaced help content.
Before
After
THE Acknowledgement process
Because of local regulations, Googlers in Argentina, Croatia, and Mexico have to acknowledge their pay stubs.
Before
Before users could view their latest pay stub, they had to view and accept all their previous ones. The existing UX was confusing to say the least.
After
We added a status column to more clearly show if the user needs to take any action, hover text to explain why they can’t view the latest pay stubs, and call-to-action buttons to show their next steps.
Confirmation modal
The modals needed a little attention as well.
After
Before
RESULTS AND recommendations for the future
We came up with quite a few ideas for the future. Ideally, the tool will be able to pull data from paychecks, which would give Googlers greater insights into their finances.
The success of the sprint has also caught traction within Core UX. As a result, we’re establishing a model where a small, diverse team tackles products that don’t have dedicated design resources.