Making performance reviews easier to set up, track, and manage

The challenge wasn't adding another feature. It was simplifying a system that had already grown complex.

Workforce Now's Performance Management module supported 25,000+ client organizations, multiple review types, and three user groups — HR practitioners, managers, and employees. Rather than redesigning the entire module, I first narrowed the scope to where client usage and workflow complexity overlapped.

This became the focused starting point for the refresh; the other review types remained outside the first scope.

Across feedback, support data, and research, the same pattern kept appearing.

Three problems kept showing up

These three problems became the three design challenges that shaped the rest of the project: simplifying setup, making review-cycle status clear, and helping HR practitioners identify and act on individual reviews that needed attention.

Before designing the solution, I mapped the review at three levels.

The module serves HR practitioners, managers, and employees across a shared review lifecycle. I mapped it end-to-end to understand what needed to be configured, where the overall cycle stood, and where each individual review was within that cycle.

This gave the redesign three clear moments: configure the review, understand where the cycle stands, then act on the individual reviews that need attention.

From a fragmented setup process to a guided review builder

Creating a review cycle meant configuring information across multiple disconnected areas—and manually figuring out how those decisions affected one another.

The old setup distributed related decisions across multiple surfaces.

Who was included affected the review scope. Milestones determined when actions happened. Reminders depended on those milestones.

Rather than expose everything at once, I structured the experience as a guided sequence, allowing each decision to build on the previous one.

A single guided setup flow replaced the fragmented configuration experience.

The hardest part was making the system's logic understandable without making the user do the work.

Performance reviews contain a lot of dependencies: evaluation periods determine milestones, milestones determine deadlines, and deadlines determine reminders.

The design challenge was to keep practitioners in control without making them manually manage that underlying logic.

From configuring dates to reviewing a timeline

Instead of making HR practitioners construct the review timeline from scratch, the system established a starting point and let them adjust it.

From calculating dates to configuring intent

System defaults and a visual schedule let practitioners define the reminder strategy without manually calculating every date.

From "Where are my reviews?" to "What needs my attention?"

The old landing page showed review cycles, but didn't help practitioners understand which ones were active, what was coming next, or where intervention was needed.

The old page showed information, but made prioritization difficult.

The final landing page

State told practitioners where each cycle stood, while the page surfaced the work that needed attention.

From tracking status to knowing who needs attention

Knowing which review cycle needed attention was only the first step. Inside a cycle, HR practitioners still needed to identify which employees were behind, what stage they were in, and what action to take.

Design decision

The direction that shipped treated the timeline and table as complementary views — one for understanding progress, the other for taking action.

The final review cycle detail page

The goal wasn't to make the table easier to read. It was to make the next action easier to find.

One system, from setup to action.

The redesign connected three previously fragmented experiences into one continuous workflow.

Set Up

Guided configuration

Monitor

Clear review-cycle state

Act

Action-oriented review workspace

The result was a connected experience that moved HR practitioners from configuring the work → understanding the work → acting on the work.

We tested whether the new experience actually made the complexity easier to navigate.

We ran unmoderated usability testing on the setup and tracking flows before development handoff.

The experience worked best when the system surfaced the state of the review for the practitioner — rather than asking them to reconstruct it from dates, statuses, and individual records.

From pilot to broader rollout

The redesigned experience moved from pilot to broader rollout, with retention remaining strong after the refresh.

What I owned

I shaped the problem as well as the product. I defined the design scope, prioritized the highest-volume workflow, translated research into design priorities, and owned the experience from setup through cycle and individual-review tracking.

How we worked

I kept day-to-day design decisions within the working triad and used leadership checkpoints to align on direction and final experience.

What I deliberately didn't solve

The trade-off was intentional: go deeper on the dominant workflow rather than spread the redesign across every review type.

What I'd do differently today

This project taught me that simplifying an enterprise workflow isn't only about reducing the number of screens. The harder part is deciding which complexity the system should absorb, and which complexity the user genuinely needs to control.

Today, I'd bring engineering into the earliest exploration of high-volume tracking surfaces, and pair behavioral data with moderated research to better understand the edge cases outside the dominant workflow.

The goal wasn't to make Performance Management simpler by hiding complexity.

It was to make the complexity manageable.

The redesign didn't remove the complexity of performance reviews. It gave practitioners a clearer way to move through it.