SAP Labs are SAP’s core R&D entities, developing and constantly improving key SAP solutions. These research and development locations are strategically located in high-tech clusters around the globe and reflect SAP’s culture of diversity and innovation.

I was hired as a UX Designer as a part of the Silicon Valley Next Talent rotational program. I worked on 5 teams in a number of different roles during this time including UX Design, UX Research, Visual Design, and Product Management. What I loved most about my time here was the exposure to many teams and projects at every stage of product development and the chance to learn about the inner workings of a large corporation.

Pay Equity Advisor (2018-2019)

PROJECT BRIEF: As a part of SAP’s 1 Billion Lives internal entrepreneurship program in partnership with the SAP.iO Venture Studio, the Pay Equity Advisor team seeks to use artificial intelligence to find and correct pay inequities for SAP SuccessFactor’s customers. I was brought in as one of the first two designers for the product to conduct user research to understand how companies currently identify and rectify pay inequities. We used this research to build a clickable prototype which was used to conduct more user research to inform the first build of the product.

MY ROLE: Qualitative Research, UX Design, Visual Design

For this project, I worked in concert with a team of 2 product managers, 1 data scientist, and 1 designer to bring this project to life. Over a period of 4 months, I led 20+ research calls with SuccessFactors customers and condensed the findings into research documents with user insights for the team to reference. These research documents were then used to design the prototype and other assets such as pitch decks and customer reports.

This project excited me because it was a truly messy social problem with the potential to have huge business impact. The issue of pay equity is a highly contentious issue with no consensus of what is the right approach to fixing the problem. Nearly every organization has their own definition of what constitutes a pay inequity. Additionally, we were using a new algorithm to identify anomalies but users didn’t always understand why or how it identified issues so there was a barrier to trust in the solution.

After conducting a month-long intensive research study with customers, we designed a clickable prototype for how the app might look and feel. The design was based on SAP Fiori design guidelines to ensure easy development and deployment. During reviews, customers commented on the clean, logical, and beautiful interface combined with the powerful solution that made the complex idea very easily tangible.

Layout

Personas

In initial our research, we found that many organizations attack pay inequity as a top-down initiative. This means that the push to fix pay inequities often started with the executive team making it a business priority. They would commission a pay equity audit with an internal, external, or hybrid team. Using the feedback from this report, the finance team can generate a budget to accommodate the necessary salary changes. The anomalies identified would be flagged for review and passed down through different levels of authority until it reaches the direct manager of the impacted employee. This finding led us to approach led us to our initial design of the app as having user personas with a hierarchy of executive function and a linear flow of decision making.

We designed 3 personas within a fictional company to demonstrate how the app-mediate pay inequity remediation process process might work:

• Chief Financial Officer (Executive)

• HR Business Partner (Mid-Level)

• Line Manager (Direct Management)

The Chief Financial Officer persona has visibility to

Pay Equity Advisor Prototype: Selected Screens

A: Homepage, Executive

Pay Equity Report

Following user research interviews, customers submitted their data to be analyzed by the pay equity algorithm. With the app not yet complete, we needed a way to present customers their results in a low-tech but high-fidelity way. To solve this problem, I designed a Pay Equity Report that explains the algorithmically-driven Pay Equity Advisor approach to pay equity using visuals and plain language. This report will serve as a tonal inspiration for the final version of the application.