Proliant Case Study

Who is Proliant?

Proliant provides industry leading Payroll and HR software to over 5000 customers. I have designed numerous solutions for their products from Applicant Tracking to Global Notifications.

The experience design challenge.

Proliant customers needed a better way to not only build internal PDFs faster but to add their company specific data for more customized PDFs that can be sent out to one or many employees.

My role.

As Senior User Experience designer for Proliant, my roles for this challenge included internal user testing, low & high fidelity wireframes in Sketch and Figma, Invision prototyping and working with this project's developers and QA to ensure my designs were translated accordingly.

Where did I start?

Identify pain points and needs.

Not all Proliant customers have a PDF builder tool like Acrobat
Proliant account managers are often tasked with making PDFs for clients losing valuable time
Integrating framed document viewers isn't a great experience
Pre-built PDFs are missing dynamic fileds
Clients need a way to get employee signature signoffs

Kickoff with analog whiteboard session.

Yes, that's my family's weekly calendar filling in for the whiteboard session.

Establish gameplan for V1 release.

1. Creation of a Hub page
2. Design a Form/PDF builder experience including...
Design drag & drop capabilities - add dynamic fields
Design multi-language support
Design employee selection for PDF assignment
Repurposing this experience for future Report Builder

Creation of the Hub page

Hub wireframes.

I started out by simply establishing a baseline for the hub page using Invision's Freehand tool. I wanted to leverage the "cards" we designed for our internal ESS Portal but that experience quickly became overcrowded and it was important that this hub did not follow the same path. Asking questions with these low fidelity wireframes allowed me to gather feedback quickly from others before moving forward.

Higher fidelity work on page structure.

There were numerous opportunities for me to map out the structure of the data that can go into a PDF or Form. Knowing there could be hundreds of form fields it was important to see what the pages could look like with so much data. Even though it felt crowded at first, I was able to nestle a good representation of possible fields within our 3 column page structure.

Drag and drop + dynamic fields.

One of my main objectives in designing the builder was to implement an easy to use drag and drop interface. I worked through different iterations of the animation itself and ways for a user to know what element of the builder they are using without being too loud. In addition to the drag and drop feature, I also needed to explore the presentation of the dynamic fields. These dynamic fields will pull in customer data that can be used to generate very specific PDFs and Reports.

Proliant - PDF / Form Builder Drag and Drop 2

Proliant - PDF / Form Builder Drag and Drop 1

Multi-language support.

Future iterations of the builder will need to integrate multi-language support. Due to the product only supporting Spanish at this point, I went with a segmented control to toggle back and forth between English and Spanish. I would replace that segmented control with a dropdown to better manage 3+ languages. I also designed a side-by-side presentation of fields so users can see the values of each language while building the PDFs and Forms.

Adding recipients.

Just as important as building the PDFs and Reports is the selection of the one or many recipients. I went with a simple toggle/switch where the admins using the builder can essentially activate the user who should receive the PDF or Report.