Vacation Settlements — Usability Testing

In Jisr, a vacation settlement is rarely one person's job. It moves between HR and finance — and sometimes lands on a single person covering both. Whoever reviews it has to be confident enough to approve real money: flight tickets, re-entry visas, working-day salary, end-of-service details.

Before committing to the solution, we needed to know one thing: did the interface actually help these reviewers understand what they were approving and decide with confidence — or were they signing off on numbers they couldn't fully see?

I worked with the product managers to understand the requirements, then ran the research and usability testing end to end and turned the findings into clear design recommendations.

I used a Lean approach — Build, Measure, Learn: ship an initial concept, measure how people actually interact with it, then improve the design from what we learned rather than from what we assumed. I tested across the three groups who live this task differently: HR Operations, Finance Operations, and the people who carry both.

The first concept put the settlement inside a side modal. Testing showed it immediately: the modal was too small for the task. People needed to review several details before approving — flight tickets, re-entry visa, working days, salary — and the modal hid exactly the financial details the decision depended on. Working-day salary in particular needed clearer wording and structure.

But the sharpest finding wasn't about layout at all. The term "Off-cycle payroll" kept stopping people — especially HR Operations — because it didn't match the language they use in their daily work. They understood the screen visually, yet still hesitated, because the words didn't sound like their job.

That was the reframe: the real blocker to a confident approval wasn't the interface — it was the vocabulary.

I built around one goal: let the reviewer approve with confidence. That meant two things working together — surfacing the financial details the decision rests on, and speaking the user's own language so nothing feels foreign at the moment of approval.

Confidence here isn't a nice-to-have. An approval is a financial commitment; if the reviewer can't fully see what they're signing off on, or can't recognize the words, they hesitate — and a hesitant approval is a broken flow.

I designed for review and validation, not just a quick confirm. The key moves:

Replaced the side modal with a dedicated review page, so the task had room to breathe instead of being squeezed into a panel.

Gave salary, flight ticket, and re-entry visa their own visible space on the page, instead of tucking critical financial details inside small UI components where they were easy to miss.

Restructured and reworded the working-day salary section so the numbers read clearly at a glance.

Flagged the terminology itself as a design problem — recommending we revise terms like "Off-cycle payroll" to match how the market and the users actually think, rather than the system's internal naming.

The redesigned flow lifted usability to 81%, up from the first concept — a clear signal that giving the task room and visibility worked. Across all groups and tasks the overall usability score landed at 66.6%, with an NPS of 8.2.

More importantly, the testing changed what we were optimizing. It showed that HR Operations needed the most simplification, and that terminology — not layout — was the next lever to pull. That turned a usability test into a clear, prioritized direction: fix the words, simplify for the group that struggled most, and keep the financial details in plain sight.

The lasting lesson: in HR products, clear terminology is as important as clear UI. People can read a screen perfectly and still hesitate if the language doesn't sound like their work.