How user-friendly is your HR tech’s user-interface?

In one of it’s reports titled ‘HCM Buying Trends in 2013’, Bersin Research by Deloitte had identified a long neglected fact. About 73% of the respondents had voted User Experience to be one of the Top Five Reasons for an Organization to seek a new HRIS. In the world, where disruptive technological trends are updated every quarter, User Experience had been kind of overlooked. Buzzwords like Cloud, Big Data, Social Media and Analytics had somewhat short-sighted the business decision makers while choosing their company’s ideal HCM solution/HRIS.
However, when the HR software’s ‘so-called self-explanatory Graphical User Interface’ created hiccups in terms of easy usage, the decision makers felt the need for additional training. Ultimately the HR professionals as well as their CIO/CTOs felt the pinch of neglecting User experience over cost & security factor of the HRIS. Such realizations have now been thankfully reflected in recent trends in buying HCM software.
The primary challenges faced while using an outdated 90’s video game like HR software interface and its implications are:

1. Complex terminologies – Application developers or designers can surely work wonders by coding the interface between man and machine. However, while designing the same, if they lack the supervision of Subject-matter experts or communication specialists, they complicate even the simplest of concepts by using tech-jargon.
2. Lack of the visual – Studies have revealed that the human brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text and about 90% of what we comprehend is visual. Thus be it the color scheme or the layout of the various features & functionalities of the HRIS, a visual experience should always complement the content strategy.
3. Diverted & delayed access to information – Access to certain functionalities are so convoluted that common intuition fails while try to use them in the hour of need. They take up more time and create frustrations for the users.
4. Low usage statistics – Discouraged by the delayed and complicated usage experience of HR softwares, employees either selectively use the HRIS or totally avoid using it. The employer’s investment goes in vain and innovative functionalities gather the dust of oblivion.
5. Creating a problem rather than a solution – Stuck with an HRIS for the duration of the service contract, Employers try to compensate the lack of GUI intuitiveness with Training. This again costs money & time, which in turn adds up to the list of challenges in optimally operating a workforce.

PeopleWorks is a cloud based employee lifecycle management solution with interlinked modules to manage all aspects of an employee’s life from hire to retire. Our approach to solving the above mentioned challenges of designing a truly self-explanatory user interface is tackled by the following practices:

1. Complex terminologies – The people behind PeopleWorks, our subject matter-experts make sure that
   • only self-explanatory terminologies are used all over the solution
   • the majority of the clickable links have a mouse-over hint or description
   • even the error messages try to direct you to the right-solution
2. Lack of the visual – A minimalist set of icons, an eye-soothing color scheme and paneled layout of our solution’s functionalities ensure that our users don’t have to strain their eyes to productively use our solution.
3. Diverted & delayed access to information – The home-screen like portal page of our solution, My World cuts through the clutter. It has one-click accessible widgets to attendance, leave & compensation, a neat stack of the user’s most visited links and a list of the action items pending the user’s perusal.
4. Low usage statistics – Things don’t get out of control if they are initially based on careful strategy. But to prepare you for the worst, PeopleWorks features an ingenious Usage Analytics feature to pin-point exactly which individual/teams have been utilizing your investment and to what extent.
5. Creating a problem rather than a solution – The PeopleWorks solution does not let hurdles of usage retard your business’ growth through:
   • readily accessible & indexed Online Help feature
   • The ‘train-the-trainer’ activity during the initial implementation stage
   • strict SLA’s of solving every one of your queries within 3 business days

We had also recently surveyed the key users of our solution while releasing the 12^th version of our regular product updates. Out of the 292 respondents, 128 (44%) of our key users ranked our User Interface to be more than satisfactory. More importantly, our new enhancements on Color Scheme, on-click accessible widgets and new set of minimalistic icons, were also highly appreciated in the same survey.
If your enterprise is also suffering from the afore-mentioned challenges of using an HRIS with outdated GUI, please drop us a mail at peopleworks@localhost or visit www.peopleworks.in or connect through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.