SurePayroll
Product Revamp
SurePayroll had just gone through a major rebrand, and my role was to bring that new identity to life within the product—focusing on the onboarding and dashboard experience.
The legacy onboarding flow was long and complex, often taking users days to complete. Many dropped off midway or called customer support to finish over the phone. I saw an opportunity to simplify this journey and make it more engaging. Working closely with product and engineering, I introduced a new design language and restructured the flow into three clear phases: sign-up, understanding user needs, and completing key steps before arriving at a redesigned first-time user dashboard.
This hybrid dashboard allowed users to run their first payroll quickly while finishing the remaining onboarding tasks at their own pace. The result was a smoother, more rewarding experience that reduced friction, built confidence, and reflected the warmth of the new brand.
Design
system
My first step in this project was translating the new SurePayroll brand into a living design system. I rebuilt components, restructured the font hierarchy, and refined button sizes, color contrast, and spacing to meet accessibility standards. I also designed micro-interactions that added warmth and clarity to key moments. This groundwork set the tone for a cohesive, scalable product experience that carried the new brand across onboarding and dashboard surfaces.
Conversational
Onboarding
After building the design foundation, I turned my focus to reimagining the onboarding flow. The old experience was long, rigid, and full of friction points—many users would drop off or call support to finish setup. My goal was to simplify the journey without compromising business requirements. I reduced the number of steps, introduced clearer milestones, and restructured the flow to guide users toward their first payroll faster. Alongside this, I crafted a more conversational tone—friendly, guiding, and reassuring—to help users feel understood rather than processed. The result was a smoother, more human onboarding experience that built trust from the very first interaction.
Two Dashboards,
One Journey
During the onboarding redesign, we discovered that many steps weren’t necessary to help users run their first payroll. As a result, users spent weeks in setup before ever reaching the dashboard—leaving them feeling stuck rather than accomplished. To fix this, we designed two dashboards. The first was a “Getting Started” dashboard—focused entirely on helping users complete their first payroll through clear, engaging steps and light gamification that celebrated progress. Once users finished their first run, they transitioned to the main dashboard, a richer experience built for ongoing management, insights, and growth. This dual-dashboard approach gave new users an early sense of success while keeping experienced users empowered with a more complete workspace.
Payroll
on the Go
Another key part of this project was rethinking SurePayroll’s weak mobile experience. Running payroll was demanding, and users often had to sit for hours at their desk to complete onboarding and setup. For the first time, we brought onboarding to mobile, creating a seamless connection between desktop and phone. This allowed users to scan documents, upload forms, and share contact information directly from their device, making the process faster, lighter, and more human.
Impact
& Reflection
The redesigned onboarding and dual-dashboard experience went through extensive user testing and showed strong results in both user satisfaction and business efficiency. The new design system and mobile onboarding created a consistent, human-centered experience across platforms, reflecting the brand’s promise of simplicity and trust while empowering internal teams to design faster and more cohesively. The project has not yet gone live, but the team is actively working on implementation and aiming for release by the end of Q4. It’s already serving as a model for how thoughtful UX and brand storytelling can reshape not only a product, but also how a company thinks about design.
Chief Product Officer (Client): Ylang Nguyen, Sr Product Manager: Ken Manz,
Execution Agency: Atypical.