Simplifying total compensation
Oracle • Concept 2024
ROLE
UX Design Intern with Principal Designer, UX Researcher and PM
SKILLS
User Research, UX Design, Storytelling, Design Systems, Figma
AMBITION
How might we help managers make informed and equitable compensation decisions?
PROBLEM
Managers make high-stakes compensation decisions with no single source of truth
Managers rely on a patchwork of past check-in documents, performance reviews, and scattered personal notes to make compensation decisions, creating uncertainty and stress during an already high-pressure review season. Oracle's compensation tool is data-rich, but in the sea of numbers, employees often get reduced to a rating, a ranking, or a compa-ratio.
SOLUTION
An individual worker's display that highlights the employee's performance and compensation history.
TIMELINE
Over the span of my 12 week internship, I conducted interviews, card-sorting research workshops, hosted brainstorming sessions, created countless wireframes, and presented to leadership.
RESEARCH
Managers don't struggle from a lack of data, they struggle to see how compensation lands on an individual. Decisions get made in the context of an entire team, which makes it hard to reason about how a decision affects one person, especially across different geographies.
I designed a 2-part research protocol: first, open-ended interviews on what makes a decision feel 'informed'; second, a card-sorting activity to surface what data managers actually prioritize versus ignore. With this 2-part protocol, I interviewed 5 managers and synthesized past UXR findings on workforce compensation to scope my internship's focus. Alongside this, I had to understand how total compensation works. Components vary by industry, so for this internship I focused on typical tech compensation: base salary, bonus, and equity in the form of RSUs. So what makes total comp so hard to reason about? 1. Managers must use equity strategically to retain top talent 2. Vesting schedules complicate how 'reward' translates to 'value received' 3. Intended value and actual value can diverge significantly
DESIGN EXPLORATIONS
From simulations to a single visual timeline
Research found that that there was confusion over individual compensation and equity, so I framed a clarity-of-purpose statement to anchor the work: 'As a manager, I need to understand the current and projected cash value of an employee's total compensation in order to strategically retain top talent and make balanced adjustments to the ratio of comp elements.'
FINAL DESIGN
An individual worker’s display that highlights the employee’s performance, career, and compensation history.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Prioritization is tough but essential.
It's better to solve one problem well than to spread effort thin across many shallow improvements. There were so many opportunities to highlight the individual, but due to the tight timeline, I chose to focus on understanding the impact of equity on the individual.
Storytelling is core to the design role.
Tailoring the message to the audience, whether a manager or a VP, is what makes feedback actionable.
Adding a dollar sign to a number can get emotional.
Pay equity is personal. Young professionals are especially vulnerable to pay confusion, often because they haven't had the chance to learn how comp structures work. Understanding your own contract matters. It's been genuinely rewarding to help reshape how people understand their own pay.
OUTCOMES & IMPACT
Due to NDA, I can't share full details, but several concepts from this work, including adding an individual-centric timeline approach, were adopted into the final product.
“Beautiful job, Mika. Mika also did a great job with her listening sessions. Loved the way she asked questions, probed, focused on the issue, and internalized those in understanding the problem.”
— VP of UX Research
“Mika should be the source of info for RSUs for us full-time employees going forward — most of us don't understand it to this degree :)”
— UX Research Manager
“Great storytelling. Simplified such a complicated business problem. Very few understand total comp like this, and in such a short time!”
— VP of Design
Thank you, Rosemary and Sabrina, for being the best design mentors <3. I'm also especially grateful to the workforce compensation product team, Kathy, Nina, Hau, and Anadi, for having the time and patience to give me a deeper understanding of total compensation.