Company
Justworks is a leading HR services platform that simplifies payroll, benefits, compliance, and support for thousands of small to medium-sized businesses worldwide.
My Mandate
Design tools that make global hiring as seamless as domestic, supporting the firm’s international expansion beyond the U.S.
Project: Employer of Record Cost Calculator
A cost calculator that gives internal teams and clients instant, accurate employment cost estimates by country or state/province, factoring in salary and benefits. Built for sales reps closing deals and clients seeking self-service clarity, it delivers speed, transparency, and confidence in every hiring decision.
Problem: What’s not working
Sales reps spent up to an hour manually building country-specific cost reports in Excel — sourcing tax rates, fixing broken formulas, and battling version errors. The impact:
Slow sales cycles and frustrated clients
Inconsistent outputs that eroded trust
Missed opportunities as prospects moved on
Approach: How the solution took shape
1. Empathy & Research
To understand the problem at a granular level, I stepped into the process myself — manually building cost reports in raw spreadsheets, sourcing country-specific tax brackets, calculating benefits, and logging every error.
This firsthand immersion revealed critical friction points: scattered data sources, error-prone formulas, and no standardized output.
I then interviewed Sales, Finance, and prospective clients, mapping their workflows alongside emotion cues to capture both the steps and the frustrations at each stage.
Key insight: both internal and external users valued speed and trust above all else.
2. Ideation & Prioritization
With pain points clear, I facilitated a two-part ideation process:
An initial workshop with designers and the PM to generate solution concepts.
A cross-functional session with Engineering, Sales, and Finance, using an Impact × Effort board covered in color-coded stickies to align on scope.
MVP priorities identified:
Country & State selector
Benefits plan dropdown
Gross salary input with annual/monthly toggle
Generate Report button
Color-coded employer vs. employee cost breakdown
3. Exploration & Wireframes
To communicate the vision early, I created hand-drawn, full-width wireframes annotated with notes on form placement, collapsible sections, and key calls-to-action (CTAs).
These low-fidelity sketches allowed me to validate layout hierarchy, field grouping, and report structure before investing in higher fidelity.
Early feedback from Engineering helped flag potential technical constraints before they became blockers.
4. Design & Prototype
Building on validated wireframes, I developed two mid-fidelity Figma mocks in grayscale with blue accents for quick iteration, then evolved them into high-fidelity screens aligned with the Justworks design system.
Designed responsive layouts for both desktop and mobile use.
Used visual cues — like color segmentation for employer vs. employee costs — to make reports instantly scannable and trustworthy.
Usability testing confirmed that users could generate a cost report in under 5 seconds — a dramatic improvement from the original 1-hour process.
Results & Impact
The cost calculator delivered measurable gains in both efficiency and revenue:
Report generation time: 1 hr → 5 sec (~700 hrs saved/month)
Support email volume: 5/day → 2/week (~90% reduction)
PEO → EOR service conversions*: +15% increase
* Why it matters:
Professional Employer Organization (PEO): Justworks co-employs staff with the client, handling payroll, benefits, and compliance, while the client still operates their own entity in that country.
Employer of Record (EOR): Justworks becomes the legal employer in that country, allowing clients to hire internationally without setting up their own entity.
The cost calculator clarified the costs and value of EOR, prompting more clients to upgrade.