Gusto is a provider of payroll and HR solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. By 2024, 70% of new customers were micro-businesses hiring their first 1-5 employees. These first-time employers were excited to grow their teams but often felt overwhelmed by the complexities of HR government requirements. This is the story of how I led a compliance MVP project.
From the business standpoint, our goal was to increase adoption of HR tools between emerging businesses. However my team was seeing low adoption.
To understand why, I embarked on empathy interviews with my research partners. We gathered valuable insights about their hiring process and real needs:
A surprising fact, was that new employers did not need our applicant tracking system.
Instead, craved help from Gusto to ensure they follow the right hiring steps, as they considered it a big risk.
Hiring via word-of-mouth
Most customers said they found their first employees through their network and didn't need our applicant tracking system.
Need for guidance to follow HR regulations
In contrast, new employers felt overwhelmed by HR government regulations. Fearing making mistakes, they expected Gusto, to guide them.
Lack of awareness of how Gusto can help
Customers didn't know that Gusto offered background checks, offer letters and onboarding checklists. Features that could help them follow the right processes.
Intentional and cost-conscious tool usage
SMB owners prioritized tools only as their business expanded, emphasizing affordability.
These insights were presented on a journey map that identifies product gaps, opportunities and pain points that would help my team decide what to focus on next. Compliance help and a restructure of our HR offerings emerged as top needs.
With a clear direction, I led the design and development of solutions tailored to first-time employers:
Prioritization framework: I helped the team focus on essential features, preventing scope creep and ensuring we delivered value pushing them to ruthlessly prioritize the features new employers needed in a 3-part workshop.
Vision story: I crafted a compelling story that showed the essential aspects of our 1-year vision in a realistic way, showcasing the three areas of focus for our team: Tailored hiring guidance and product offerings, HR compliance and smart-assistance in our HR flows.
In the story we empowered Jessica, a small business owner, to successfully navigate the challenges of hiring her first employee. Gusto guides Jessica through essential HR processes and best practices, ensuring compliance, answering questions, and ultimately allowing her to focus on her passion—running her coffee business.
Create a compliance alert system that surfaces requirements and offers solutions inside Gusto. Starts with HR as the first use case, and expands to payroll and benefits.
Use Hiring Tools Home as a role model to show how compliance awareness and education can be surfaced in context of flows and daily tasks.
Our initial use case, HR compliance training (leveraging our learning advantage), served as a valuable stress test.
This 0-1 project, executed with notifications and content teams, established design principles, patterns, and flows for compliance guidance and task completion, later scaled across Gusto.
The solution proactively alerted and guided employers on mandatory training enrollment post-hire, ensuring accuracy, scalability, and government compliance. This positioned Gusto as a trusted partner simplifying compliance.
Compliance at Gusto was communicated in a fragmented way: Multiple patterns, messages with no guidance inside flows made it difficult to customers to understand what customers needed to do Vs what Gusto did for them. A staggering 95% of customers with 0-5 employees were non-compliant with 1 or more HR requirements, posing legal risks and a missed opportunity for Gusto to provide truly valuable support.
15 small business owner interviews and data showed how important was the gap Gusto had to fill. These findings directed my team to focus our MVP on HR trainings, being the most prevalent case of non-compliance within SMB owners.
Fear of penalties was a constant in our interviewees, yet, they expressed that they only took care or government requirements when they had to.
Nobody thinks about compliance proactively
Customers noticed their obligations too late, when they get notices or penalties.
95% of SMBs at Gusto were non- HR compliant
The most common case of compliance unawareness was HR trainings.
Scattered compliance information led to unawareness
Information spread across flows left customers confused about what Gusto already covered Vs what they had to do.
Customers not only expected, but assumed Gusto helped with compliance
Since they are already using our platform, they expect Gusto to tell them what to do.
Our initial design focused on raising awareness and guiding customers through the anti-harassment training compliance process. However, this involved a manual three-step process. My vision was to streamline this process: proactively informing customers, automating deadlines and reminders, and enabling a single checkout for multiple training types. However, data limitations and technical complexity required a compromise.
Collaborating with engineering and product, we focused on accurate training recommendations, and ensuring our own flows were compliant.
I focused on designing core patterns for our compliance experience, trying to keep customers in a single context as much as possible to understand and act on compliance rules, but some of these explorations constrained the required real-estate needed to clearly communicate complex compliance rules.
Building on initial concepts, I developed wireframes and prototypes for the compliance dashboard and task system. Usability testing revealed key insights:
Preference for Direct Solutions: Customers desired a platform that provided resolution services, not just compliance information.
Need for a Simplified Task Flow: Users preferred a streamlined, in-product compliance workflow, expressing frustration with third-party redirects and complex interfaces.
Based on this feedback, I arrived at a final approach that leveraged our existing task system. Customers encounter an expandable task prompting them to provide mandated trainings, organized by state.
To ensure scalability, I collaborated with our content writer and notifications team designer to come up with design principles for the messaging framework and compliance communication pattern, and an initiative to socialize and stress-test the new patterns across many different teams actively working on compliance.
With the feedback provided by other designers, we were able to tweak the patterns and create universal solutions.
In the final flow, I prioritized a clear and safe experience, highlighting Gusto as the best solution to accomplish a compliance task: Enroll employees in training. On the employee side, I put emphasis on using email notifications and our task system to let employees know when they were overdue or close to it, to help companies be fully compliant.
Within three months we consistently saw that 10 out of 12 employers who saw HR training compliance notifications acquired trainings for their team members.
After the MVP proved to be successful to make customers aware about compliance tasks, I partnered across domains to scale the system to other use cases, providing teams with office hours to review their flows, and making sure they used the design and content frameworks created during the MVP. These use cases spanned across benefits, additional HR courses nationwide, and payroll.
Each partnership included workshops, and flow reviews to align each team's messaging and use cases with the new system.
While redesigning the HR Tools homepage, compliance prevention and education became one of the main pillars to leverage to make the experience more useful for SMB owners. The previous experience was static, with links to tools, and offered no guidance on how to hire, and how to do it compliantly.
To create a useful experience, I proposed redefining Hiring Tools as a place where customers not only had access to features, but also to education, and a how-to timeline to guide them through important steps to follow at the moment of hiring. Most of these steps were related to important compliance requirements.
After most teams with prominent compliance use cases onboarded their work into the new compliance engine and design frameworks, it became necessary to create a hub to house not only requirements, but also law changes, to avoid cluttering our Home task system. Below is one exploration of the work that is still underway to create this space. Launch timelines and priority are unclear.
Employers hire with confidence
Employers saw reduced penalties and expressed their trust in Gusto's ability to manage essential compliance needs.
Balanced user and business needs
These design initiatives balanced employer needs for guidance and compliance with Gusto's revenue goals.
Compliance-empowered SMBs
Satisfaction ratings associated with compliance increased thanks to the various efforts made in our HR flows.
