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.