Back to Work

CASE STUDY 02 · CONCEPT

Employee portal and dashboard

A two-week innovation sprint concept that reimagines PrismHR’s employee experience around a customizable, engaging dashboard.

Employee dashboard concept: a greeting, quick-action shortcuts, and widgets for pay, a personal to-do list, a time clock with weekly hours, a focus timer, time off and the employee’s team.Employee dashboard concept: a greeting, quick-action shortcuts, and widgets for pay, a personal to-do list, a time clock with weekly hours, a focus timer, time off and the employee’s team.
CONCEPT · Employee dashboard

OVERVIEW

Built in a two-week innovation sprint.

PrismHR runs innovation sprints: one sprint cycle, about two weeks, to design or build something new. I used mine to rework the HCM employee experience.

The goal was a portal people want to open, not one they visit only to check their pay or request time off, for both employees and managers.

My role

  • Solo designer and front-end developer
  • Designed and coded the concept in Angular, with help from Claude Code
  • Drew on my experience building HCM, years of user feedback, and my own experience as an HCM user
  • Presented it to product, department leaders and sales

THE PROBLEM

A portal people only opened when they had to.

The employee side of HCM covered the essentials, but it felt like a place you visit for one task and leave: check your pay, request time off, close the tab.

There was little to make it personal, and little reason to come back.

The current employee portal: a fixed dashboard of cards for benefit enrollment, pay, paid time off, benefits, life events and contacts.
BEFORE · Current employee portal

RESEARCH

Starting from what I already knew.

With two weeks, I built on experience building HCM, feedback from years at PrismHR, and my own experience using the employee side. That shaped three goals:

  • Make it personal, so it feels like your own space
  • Put everyday tasks like pay, time off and time punches one click away
  • Give people a reason to come back beyond payday

KEY DECISIONS

Three calls that shaped it

01

A dashboard you build yourself

Add or remove widgets, move and resize them, and save multiple layouts to switch between.

Widgets include pay, time off, tasks, a personal to-do list, a team directory, a timer, a stopwatch and a time punch, alongside the standard HR widgets.

02

A social feed for engagement

Employees post updates and kudos, and react and comment on each other’s posts, which gives people a reason to visit beyond payday.

03

Tools for managers, personality for everyone

Managers get extra widgets for tasks like approving time off and performance reviews.

Profiles are personal too: upload an avatar or pick an initials color, and choose a banner.

THE SOLUTION

A full employee portal.

Beyond the dashboard, it’s a complete HR portal: employee info, benefits and 401(k) summaries, and summaries and history for time off, PTO, pay and taxes.

Because it’s coded in Angular rather than mocked up, people could click through and use it, not just look at it. Everything was built mobile-friendly from the start.

Dashboard in edit mode: widgets outlined as movable blocks, with Add Widget, Cancel and Save controls.Dashboard in edit mode: widgets outlined as movable blocks, with Add Widget, Cancel and Save controls.
CONCEPT · Customizing the dashboard
Edit mode mid-drag: the My To-Do widget is being moved, with a drop target showing where it will land.
CONCEPT · Dragging a widget into place
Social page with a composer for updates, kudos, photos and polls, a pinned announcement, a kudos post, and side panels for celebrations, top kudos and new hires.
CONCEPT · Social feed
Manager dashboard: team stats, time-off requests with approve and deny, timesheet approvals, performance reviews, a team calendar, who’s out and upcoming events.Manager dashboard: team stats, time-off requests with approve and deny, timesheet approvals, performance reviews, a team calendar, who’s out and upcoming events.
CONCEPT · Manager dashboard
Mobile employee dashboard in light mode with time clock, pay and time off widgets and a bottom navigation bar.
MOBILE · Light
Mobile employee dashboard in dark mode with time clock, pay and time off widgets and a bottom navigation bar.
MOBILE · Dark

RESULTS

What changed

RESULT2 weeksfrom idea to a working Angular prototype
RESULT10+widgets
RESULT2 viewsfor employees and managers

I presented the concept at the end of the sprint. It started a wider conversation between product managers, department executives and sales about the state of HCM. An employee experience overhaul is now in planning, including how to bring these ideas in and how they could support sales.

REFLECTION

What I’d do next

I’m happy with how it came out. With more time, I’d validate it with the people who’d use it: interviews with clients and employees about what they like and dislike in the current platform, then user testing and A/B tests on the concept to see which of those frustrations it actually solves.

NEXT CASE STUDYEnterprise Design SystemRead it