Case Study 01 / 06 · Justworks · 6 months
One Justworks:
Time Unification
Three time-tracking products. Three sets of rules. Three completely different experiences. The challenge wasn't building something new. It was making sense of what already existed.
My Role
Design Lead: strategy, systems thinking, team direction, and IC design
Team
1 PM, 1 EM, 4 designers, 20+ cross-functional contributors across payroll, compliance, mobile, and support
Timeline
6 months
Scope
Desktop timesheets · Mobile clock-in/out · Internal support tools · Experience modeling
The Winchester Mystery House of product design.
Justworks had a Mystery House problem.
The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose is famous for its bizarre architecture: staircases that lead to ceilings, doors that open directly into walls, rooms built on top of rooms with no coherent plan. Charming as a tourist attraction. A nightmare to live in.
That was Justworks Time. Over years of rapid growth, three separate products had each built their own version of time tracking: ASO for smaller businesses, PEO for larger compliance-heavy ones, and EOR for international markets. Each with different rules, different UI patterns, different data models, and different interpretations of what "good" looked like.
No one set out to build a mystery house. But the business kept adding rooms, and eventually customers who upgraded between plans felt like they were jumping between entirely different companies.
My job was to stop adding rooms and ask: what should the house actually look like?
Three products, three interpretations of the same thing.
Justworks had three distinct products (ASO, PEO, and EOR), each with its own Time experience. ASO captured time by pay period, PEO displayed daily pay, and EOR was organized by project code. Three different layouts, three different approval flows, three different navigation structures.
Three products. Three completely different experiences for the same core task.
The business impact was tangible:
- Support ticket volume was high and growing, driven by confusion around time tracking
- Payroll error rates were elevated due to inconsistent time data flowing into payroll
- Feature adoption for advanced Time capabilities was low because users couldn't predict how the system would behave
- Compliance agility was slow — when California updated overtime rules, it could take 6–8 weeks to propagate changes across three separate codebases
The human impact was just as real. Hourly employees clocked in and out every single day. Admins approved timesheets for entire companies. These weren't edge-case interactions — they were core, high-frequency workflows that the product was actively making harder.
The problem wasn't a missing screen. It was a missing shared model.
When I joined this workstream, I quickly realized the problem wasn't a missing screen or a better component. Every team had a different mental model for how Time actually worked. Payroll ops had one story. Compliance had another. Engineering had a third. Customers were living in the gaps between all of them.
So my focus shifted from designing screens to designing alignment.
Build a shared Experience Model
Before committing to any interface, I led the team through building an Experience Model: a living diagram of how the Time system worked end-to-end. Not a spec. Not a prototype. An architectural model: the states, the actors, the rules, the compliance triggers, the handoffs between employee → admin → payroll. Think of it like the model an architect builds before pouring concrete.
Create the 1J Canvas
The Experience Model gave us shared understanding. The 1J Canvas turned that understanding into a daily decision-making tool for the entire mission team. Four columns: Job to Be Done, Summer Release Commitments, Current State (ASO/PEO/EOR side-by-side), and the Experience Model end-state. Once it existed, conversations completely changed: teams stopped debating screens and started aligning on principles, flows, and outcomes.
Design the unified experience
With alignment in place, we moved into the actual design work across three surfaces: unified desktop timesheets, a redesigned mobile clock-in/out experience, and internal support tooling in Customer Central.
The 1J Canvas became the team's single source of truth: for design, product, engineering, and leadership.
Experience model: the end-to-end architecture of how the Time system works.
Three surfaces. One design language.
Unified Timesheets (Desktop)
The core admin interaction. Three products had three completely different timesheet layouts: different columns, different approval patterns, different status signals. We rebuilt it as a single surface: one layout, one IA, one pattern language.
Whether you're ASO, PEO, or EOR, the core mechanics are now identical: clear columns, predictable actions, consistent status cues. Admins no longer need to relearn the system when their company's plan changes. Overtime visibility (previously requiring manual timecard-by-timecard review) is now surfaced directly in the list view.
Before/after: three fragmented timesheet layouts consolidated into one unified surface.
Mobile Time Tracking (Redesign)
The mobile clock-in/out experience touched hourly employees every single day. The old version was technically functional but full of friction: employees had to manually pick their location, confirm job codes the system already knew, and navigate a flat, visually undifferentiated interface where everything competed for equal attention.
We redesigned around three principles:
- Reduce cognitive load: smart defaults based on role, schedule, and past behavior; geolocation autofill that pre-populates location when an employee arrives at their workplace
- Establish clear hierarchy: a strong visual treatment that immediately communicates shift state (open, on break, completed) so employees always know where they are and what to do next
- Improve IA with modern patterns: bottom sheets for contextual editing, consolidated forms, flattened navigation. Employees no longer lose their place to edit a shift.
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Mobile redesign: before/after across the primary clock-in flow and shift state view.
Internal Tools (Customer Central)
Support teams were juggling three separate internal systems, one per product. To resolve a customer issue, a support agent might need to check all three. We unified this into a single view in Customer Central, giving support agents one place to see the full customer picture regardless of which product segment they were on.
Real numbers, real outcomes.
Key Results
↓50%
Admin onboarding time for hourly employees (FY25 Q1)
↓~25%
Payroll errors for ASO admins
3→1
Fragmented systems consolidated into one
↓64%
Compliance update turnaround (6–8 weeks → 2–3 weeks)
↓~30%
Time-tracking related support tickets
"Before I didn't have a quick way to identify overtime hours for my direct reports — I had to open one timecard at a time. Now I can see everything in one view, and what used to take me over an hour every week takes less than five minutes."
— Jason H., Manager · Post-launch feedback
Beyond the metrics: the 1J Canvas format was adopted by other mission teams as an organizational alignment tool. A design artifact became standard practice. That's the kind of impact that compounds.
Ship the UI and the change management.
Invest in structured change management earlier. When a redesign is this foundational — touching payroll ops, support scripts, training materials, and internal tooling — shipping the UI is only half the work.
We had solid PM and eng partnership. But in retrospect, I would have brought support and operations into design reviews much earlier. They flagged a compliance gap in our break-tracking flow during late-stage review — a multi-break edge case under strict state labor laws — that cost us an extra design cycle. If they'd been in the room at the start, we would have caught it on day one.
I also would have built a simple rollout narrative for executives earlier. Mid-project, different leaders were framing the work differently — some called it a UI refresh, others a codebase unification, others a payroll accuracy initiative. All true, but competing narratives created prioritization churn. A single concise story, set early, keeps everyone rowing in the same direction.