PayCycle Case Study

PayCycle is like cruise control for small business payroll, which is why it is America’s #1 online payroll service. PayCycle’s biggest challenge was helping customers navigate through a complex setup process that lay between them and the open road. Adaptive Path worked with PayCycle to design a new on-ramp and navigation system to help new customers plan, prepare, and pace themselves through the process. The new PayCycle PayToday™ Setup tells you where you are, points out good rest stops, reminds you where you’ve already been, and how much further you have to go, resulting in a better experience and shortcuts to the destination.

Start Page from the New Site

About PayCycle
PayCycle is an award-winning online payroll service recognized by PC Magazine, The CPA Technology Advisor Reader’s Choice Awards, and others. With over 75,000 small business customers, PayCycle is the most popular online tool for a task that every employer counts on. PayCycle’s mission is to offer best-in-class customer service while making paper-based payroll obsolete.

The Challenge
PayCycle harnesses the power of the Internet to make a complicated, recurring, and essential business function easy to manage from pay day through e-filing of taxes and forms. PayCycle’s ability to “make payroll easy” and affordable is what distinguishes it from the competition. PayCycle research showed that 70% of visitors to www.paycycle.com wanted to run payroll the day they signed up, meaning that busy small business owners were visiting PayCycle for an immediate solution. That meant that payroll setup needed to be as easy as running the payroll itself. This was a daunting challenge because the ramp-up process requires gathering a variety of information over many steps, which means there are limits to how expedited the process can be. For those unfamiliar with the intricacies of payroll management, imagine doing the taxes for your entire extended family, and their businesses, on your own. With everyday office interruptions further impeding this process, PayCycle’s customers were experiencing problems getting aboard. What could PayCycle do to make a difficult process less of a barrier for the customers who were coming to them for “easy”?

Our Work
PayCycle asked Adaptive Path to dig into the setup process to understand why new customers struggle with it, find it confusing, and sometimes get lost. We started with organizationally-focused stakeholder interviews to understand the full business implications and opportunities associated with our research program. We then launched into a series of intercept interviews with existing and prospective customers that completed our holistic view of the way people think about payroll. This investigation was the basis for the development of personas, and our understanding of how customers engage with the service. We recognized that the process was not designed to work over multiple sessions, that new customers did not have clear expectations for the process until they were well into it, and that the visual design was not supporting the process as well as it could.

Visual Design From The New Site

We then articulated a set of design criteria that emerged from these insights. Using our design criteria, we embarked on the design phase with wireframes, design patterns, work flows, and visual design. Early on, our stakeholder interviews also made it clear that practice development was an important aspect of this project, so we worked closely with the PayCycle team to instill relevant practices and methods that would allow them to implement and maintain the new approach moving forward. This not only included helping to build in new organizational competencies, but also helping to define the role for a new user experience professional who could focus on the customer experience from their first interaction with the website. In addition, we helped develop new experience design tools for the internal PayCycle team so that they could translate what they were hearing from their customers into actionable design solutions.

The Results
A streamlined, friendly look and feel, consistent page architecture, signup phases that allow customers to quickly jump in and out of sessions, and clear expectations up front have made the new setup process a much better experience. While it’s hard to deliver “easy” in the context of setup, the new process provides perspective on how much further customers have to go, and rewards them with encouragement at important points along the way. From this experience, in addition to having a great new setup process for the PayCycle service, the PayCycle team also has a new level of understanding that will continue to ensure the best possible experience for their customers moving forward. Finally, because PayCycle operates in a space where technology is not the primary competitive driver, their ability to bring design innovation to their customer experience supports their position as the market leader.