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Designing the Future of Compensation:
Pay Band Manager

From Design to Product Launch.

Challenge ↓

Design a compensation tool for HR teams to manage, update, and approve their pay bands. The Pay Band Manager.

Introduction

Designing a product from scratch means the hardest part is not always the design itself, but defining the right problems to solve and what are the solutions that will follow. I could write a full essay on this case study. Many nuances, challenges, and solutions we uncovered along the way but I’ll keep it focused in two main points for this case. First Time User Experience and Pay band creation.

If you never heard the term Pay Band

Pay Bands = Salary Ranges. They help predict annual costs and stay compliant.

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How Pay Bands Typically Look

Large, complex, and often managed in spreadsheets.

Study
This case study uses sample data. No real salary information is represented.
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Instead of chasing vague outcomes like:

  • ”Drive long-term retention.”
  • ”Ensure users engage with the tool regularly.”

The job is to get users building pay bands from day one.

How can we guide users to start using pay bands, Understand the feature, and Integrate it into their workflow?

We set our initial mission around one focus.
Onboarding as a key to fast adoption ↓

Users Should:

Create their first pay band within the first 5 minutes of using the tool.

First Time User Experience. Encouraging users to complete setup first as part of the process.

The flow I designed walks users through setup step by step, simplifying complexity and giving them everything they need to create pay bands immediately.

How do you (HR Manager) organize your pay bands in practice?
Departments
(dominant answer, reviewed every quarter)
Seniority
Location
Departments are the anchor: 10/10 HR managers structured pay bands this way
Progressive Disclosure as a key element.

After extensive research and user interviews, it became clear that one of the biggest challenges to creating pay bands was the setup itself.

Designing the onboarding around that mental model meant aligning the product to the way HR teams already work,a familiar process.

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Pay Band Creation: all inputs, all context, in one fast flow.

High Level Layout Strategy ↘

1

Departments as a strategy

To organize our users. This comes from the lengthy research on the actual process of pay bands creation

2

a visual band, instead of plain numbers

The idea is to allow users to see this in a really visual view to allow them to modify each pay band manually

3

statuses+

The status of each pay band needed to be visible at a glance. During prioritization rounds, this became a key point of discussion.

Strategy Image
This case study uses sample data. No real salary information is represented.

Design System Creation

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What data should we be looking at after launch?

Consolidation of tools that allow that is a key here. Mixpanel + Hotjar are keys.
  • Time to First Pay Band → How long it takes for a new user to create their first pay band (key behavior).
  • Support Tickets / Feedback → What are users asking about most often? Where do they seem confused?
  • Active Usage → Specifically how many are generating new bands weekly/monthly.
  • Feature Usage → Are they using statuses, visual bands, departments? Which features get ignored?
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