CLIENT
MY ROLE
PROJECT DURATION
Project Overview
About Cartus
Cartus is a global leader in workforce mobility, providing relocation and assignment management services for companies and their employees. With over 60 years of experience, Cartus supports organizations in managing the logistics of moving employees across the globe—whether for a short-term assignment or a permanent relocation. Their services include everything from housing and transportation arrangements to destination services, intercultural training, and compensation management.
The Challenge
The Compensation Project, or COMP for short, is a software solution developed to streamline and automate the process of generating cost projections for employee relocations, both domestic and international. These relocations, typically lasting between 1 to 4 years, involve estimating a wide range of expenses—such as airfare, language training, housing, real estate commissions, and calculating the complex tax implications of global moves.
Each report generated by COMP contains hundreds of line items detailing various expenses, so accuracy was paramount. The goal was to create a tool that would provide precise cost projections, ensure compliance with international tax laws, and deliver comprehensive, yet easy to create, user-friendly reports that could be quickly understood.
Prior to COMP, Cartus was using an external solution that was both costly and inefficient. This previous software lacked flexibility and scalability, causing significant operational challenges. It was a priority for Cartus to build an internal solution that would allow them to better control the user experience, reduce costs, and provide thier own competitive offering to the industry.
My Role
I was brought in as the lead Senior Product Designer and was responsible to get this project quickly in motion as it was Cartus's main priority that year and they were a bit behind schedule. In addition to driving the overall design strategy, I lead four design teams simultaneously, ensuring cohesion across all work-streams and maintaining a strong focus on timely, high-quality delivery.
Project Definition
Defining Business Objectives
Before diving into any new project, I prioritize thoroughly understanding the business objectives to ensure alignment from the start. I begin by identifying key stakeholders and collaborating with them to gain a clear understanding of the project’s value and goals. Through a combination of group discussions and one-on-one conversations, I gather valuable insights into their vision and expectations, ensuring that my design approach aligns with the broader business strategy.
Key Findings:
Compensation was originally developed by what later became it's biggest competitor. So it was not only important to move Compensation internally but to make it a competitive and a superior product, to anything in the market.
They wanted to Inject innovation, automation, and AI features, were ever possible, that was important to top executives.
Poor pricing accuracy was a well know issue, we were tasked in making projections as accurate as possible.
Comp previously did not work well with the other Cartus product, they wanted to make sure it was well integrated.
Many processes in the system were extremely tedious, they were not built by designers and could greatly be improved.
Reports were pretty limited and bland, we were asked to see if we could improve that.
They wanted to show off a functioning prototypes an up coming convention.
User Research & Analysis
Mapping System Interactions
Cartus offered a variety of products and services across multiple teams, making it crucial to understand existing systems and their interconnections before engaging with users and business stakeholders. By creating a system map early on, I gained clarity around overlapping products, features, processes, and pain points. This approach allowed me to better understand how users interact with the system and what challenges they face.
Defining and Interviewing Core Users
Through my research, I identified four key user types:
Comp Analysis: Based offshore and responsible for running daily cost projections, These were Comp's primary users. They were incentivized to complete high volumes of accurate projections each month, making efficiency and precision key to their role.
Internal Cost Projection Auditors: Functioned primarily as a secondary layer of review, ensuring the accuracy of line item estimates.
COMP Analysis Managers: Had full system access and were responsible for configuring global elements like line items and templates.
Client Contacts: Clients’ primary point of contact who could run cost projections and manage the system for their own employees.
To better understand the users, I interviewed 2-3 representatives from each group. All were fairly short recorded interviews, about an hour in length each. This allowed me to uncover key characteristics, understand their unique processes, their pain points and find out what were their desired outcomes with the new system design.
Synthesizing the data
After conducting a series of user interviews, I led a collaborative affinity mapping session to synthesize the insights gathered. During the session, we organized the interview findings into key themes, pain points, and user needs, prioritizing them based on their relevance to the product’s goals. By clustering similar feedback, we were able to uncover recurring patterns and areas of opportunity that would inform the design direction. This exercise helped ensure that we addressed both the immediate user challenges and broader strategic objectives in the final design.
The insights from the interviews directly shaped the next steps in the design process, guiding decisions on feature prioritization and design solutions. By aligning the team on user pain points and desires, we were able to move forward with a clear, data-driven approach that balanced user needs with business goals.
Core Findings:
Data was always outdated and inaccurate due to how they captured it. Relying on old data tables was causing major issues.
Data tables were manually built and a lot of the data was poorly approximated. Improving accuracy through APIs was a must.
Errors from bad data was unfairly hurting Comp Analysis performance and promotions, which they had no control over.
Cartus was hiring analysts just to check and correct the data inaccuracies known to be in the system. This was un-neccesary.
Many of the daily efforts were redundant. Comp needed ways to scale efforts - Templates were extremely underutilized.
Template offsets were creating reluctance to use templates at all due to fear they may cause downline errors.
The overall experience for new users was not intuitive making Cartus have to rely heavily on personalized training.
There was no management of templates as there was just too many offsets. Offsets needed to happen at the client level.
Clients wanted their own client based line items and templates that were private and specific to their needs.
Cartus needed ways to globalize small reusable calculations that could easily be repeated and used in line items.
Users had to change values in all line items just to reorder a single line item or section. Re-ordering an item was very tedious.
