Netchex Onboarding & Workflows was created to solve a long-standing user challenge—a lack of automation for key HR processes across the entire employee lifecycle, from hire to exit. As the design lead, I was involved in every phase of the project, from initial research and UX strategy, to visual design and rollout planning.
For HR teams using Netchex, a payroll and HRIS platform, managing employee lifecycle events often meant leaving the product altogether. Onboarding, promotions, and other key changes relied on emails, spreadsheets, and paper forms—resulting in heavy manual effort, fragmented communication, and no reliable audit trail. Over time, these disconnected processes became one of Netchex’s biggest sources of client frustration and a key driver of lost sales. Onboarding & Workflows was designed to centralize and automate these critical moments, closing competitive disadvantages and removing friction from everyday HR work.
Understand current user processes and product gaps to create a centralized, user-friendly task management system that automates and tracks HR processes across the employee lifecycle.
Deliver value quickly through an iterative, agile approach, enabling Sales to confidently position and sell workflow automation, while continuing to evolve the experience based on real customer needs.
Project Value
User Interviews
Competitive Analysis
Task Flows
Rapid Ideation & Feedback Cycles
Hi-Fi Prototype
Structured Phasing
Beta Feedback
With Netchex’s core customers being in high-turnover industries, a robust onboarding and employee change workflows product presents a major opportunity for impact.
Beyond reducing HR time through automation, a stronger onboarding experience delivers measurable business impact—improving employee retention by 82%, increasing productivity by 70%, and driving 18× higher employee commitment.
Following early customer research, we prioritized employee change workflows—such as compensation updates and promotions—as the first area for implementation. These scenarios surfaced as a key gap in the Netchex system and offered the greatest opportunity for immediate impact.
Netchex previously offered a legacy onboarding product, NetGuide, with limited workflow functionality. Through in-depth customer interviews, we learned the product failed to meet clients’ needs and was difficult to set up and maintain, requiring many customers to rely on Netchex Support to build tasks and workflows for them.
To avoid being constrained by the existing solution, we looked beyond NetGuide to understand how customers currently managed onboarding end-to-end and how they ideally wanted these processes to work. This broader perspective helped us identify key frustrations and design a more flexible, future-focused experience.
With Netchex’s core customers being in high-turnover industries, a robust onboarding and employee change workflows product presents a major opportunity for impact.
Beyond reducing HR time through automation, a stronger onboarding experience delivers measurable business impact—improving employee retention by 82%, increasing productivity by 70%, and driving 18× higher employee commitment.
With a clear understanding of both the business & customer value, we met with users to learn about their current onboarding & employee change workflows to identify opportunities to better meet their needs.
Following early customer research, we prioritized employee change workflows—such as compensation updates and promotions—as the first area for implementation. These scenarios surfaced as a key gap in the Netchex system and offered the greatest opportunity for immediate impact.
Netchex previously offered a legacy onboarding product, NetGuide, with limited workflow functionality. Through in-depth customer interviews, we learned the product failed to meet clients’ needs and was difficult to set up and maintain, requiring many customers to rely on Netchex Support to build tasks and workflows for them.
To avoid being constrained by the existing solution, we looked beyond NetGuide to understand how customers currently managed onboarding end-to-end and how they ideally wanted these processes to work. This broader perspective helped us identify key frustrations and design a more flexible, future-focused experience.
In addition to user interviews, I conducted a thorough competitive analysis to understand what their solutions offer, what we need to match to stay competitive, and where we have opportunities to differentiate.
With this research in hand, my product manager and I started brainstorming the ideal task setup and workflow functionality. Through targeted rounds of research and user testing, we ultimately landed on these central user flows and capabilities of the product.
With this research in hand, my product manager and I started brainstorming the ideal task setup and workflow functionality. Through targeted rounds of research and user testing, we ultimately landed on these central user flows and capabilities of the product.
As we defined the foundation of our task system, I continuously created mockups to share concepts with key stakeholders and, as ideas evolved, with clients. These feedback cycles allowed us to refine the experience and make informed MVP decisions before the official project kickoff.
During this process, Netchex also underwent a major visual refresh, adopting a new component library and updated color scheme. I quickly adapted the design assets to align with these changes.
With Employee Change Requests scoped as the first release, we facilitated targeted testing sessions to validate assumptions, uncover gaps, and refine the experience before launch.
Due to the scope of the project and key business drivers, we worked iteratively—prioritizing high-impact features to deliver value quickly and learn from early user feedback. I partnered with my product manager and key stakeholders to define the initial feature set, while documenting future phases and design details as development progressed.
While the new onboarding system certainly introduced a more modern, intuitive interface, achieving functional parity with NetGuide was critical to make the transition valuable to users. A key strength of the existing experience was Netchex’s pre-built forms, which seamlessly mapped employee inputs to core HR data fields. The challenge was to modernize and simplify these forms to improve user clarity while also enabling more efficient development.
For much of the project, our focus was on the admin and manager experience of workflow setup and task management. However, to fully deliver on the product’s customer value, we recognized the need to rethink the employee onboarding experience as well. The existing new hire experience was fragmented and unintuitive, with outdated UI and disconnected navigation that made it difficult for new hires to stay oriented.Through competitive research and AI-assisted design exploration, I reimagined the onboarding dashboard as a centralized hub—enabling employees to manage their profile, track task progress, and engage with company information leading up to their hire date.
Following the MVP launch, we gathered feedback from clients and Netchex admins to guide next priorities. For example, while updates to approver group settings were originally scoped for a later phase, beta feedback revealed that organizing approvers not just by company, but by department was critical—prompting us to reprioritize and deliver these updates sooner.
Following its beta release, Onboarding & Workflows began to show early signs of both product-market fit and long-term business impact, validating the need for a more flexible and scalable approach to managing onboarding & employee changes.
