How PayFit makes HR tech accessible to all through design

Staying compliant with regulatory changes has always been a huge task in the HR sector. And the challenges spiralled in 2020 with the introduction of new remote working policies, wellbeing initiatives and learning and development plans.

To help payroll practitioners stay ahead of the game, HR tech needs to be adaptable, automated and intuitive. And for that to happen, problem solvers across product, design and engineering need to work as one.

Paris-based PayFit has successfully achieved this with an innovative approach to design and product development that has contributed to the company becoming one of France’s top unicorns with rapid revenue growth. 

PayFit is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that helps very small businesses and SMBs manage their payroll and HR processes, and it’s been built from the ground up to be adaptable. One of the company’s goals is to enable everyone, without being an HR or payroll expert, to manage the professional lives of their employees with ease. This was a task that required specific thinking from both a design and coding perspective. And that’s where Figma helps.

Low-code as enabler of velocity and speed

When they created the company, PayFit’s founders wanted the product to be just as easy to use for HR and payroll specialists, who typically have no coding skills, as it was for developers, who don’t have the payroll domain expertise.

They came up with a novel solution: a low-code programming language called JetLang which separates business logic from the code used for software engineering, while allowing both pieces of the puzzle to thrive. PayFit’s JetLang Platform provides building blocks for someone without deep technical skills to be able to adapt and provide an experience that matches any new government regulations quickly and seamlessly.

“To give you an example, when new Covid payroll regulations were introduced, JetLang meant we could update our product in all countries in just a few weeks, in time for the next payroll of our customers,” says JetLang Platform Design Director Eleonore de Lusignan.

An end-to-end design platform

Up until this point, PayFit’s cross-disciplinary team of designers working across product design, branding, content design, user research, and design operations had worked with Sketch, InvisionApp and Abstract to build the product. But in 2020, the design team was expecting to double in size, and switching between different tools became even more challenging with teams working remotely. They needed something they could use from end to end.

“Figma more closely matches our expectations in terms of pricing, and we needed a solution that provided a more seamless experience for our team distributed between France and internationally, as we were all working fully remote due to Covid,” says Eleonore. “It’s the best way to make user experience consistent across all touch points.”

By switching to Figma, not only did they find one tool to serve all their needs, and allow all stakeholders to contribute in real time, they also gained greater control over how components and templates were used, and consistency in how designs were implemented into JetLang.

“The team decided to create a dedicated Figma library of components that replicated what product builders could implement in JetLang,” says Eleonore. This encouraged them to follow UX guidelines, improved consistency and allowed PayFit to more seamlessly test hybrid experiences that used both fullstack code and JetLang low-code.

“The impact is immense,” says Product Designer Francis Gading. “Thanks to Figma, asynchronous design reviews are much easier now. JetLang product builders collaborate easily with our content designers when improving and validating the new user flows – before moving forward with a usability session in a JetLang testing environment using real customer data.

“Ultimately, we save time reviewing work that will be implemented in low-code while also ensuring that our app is easy to use and provides a more delightful experience to our customers.”

Creating delightful user experiences

Beyond product development, PayFit has been using Figma to keep other departments aligned, and has demonstrated the value of the platform amongst groups that wouldn’t have traditionally regarded themselves as “designers”.

“From when we started using Figma, half of our editors have been ‘non-designers’ from our brand and content teams. We had to embrace this approach and create onboarding material that was agnostic for our users, no matter their background,” says Brand Designer Chloé Batiot. “The tool was new for everyone, especially non-designers, so we created a Figma onboarding interactive booklet to explain the basics, created a Brand guidelines hub, and migrated our entire Design System library within Figma too.”

One of the results of this democratisation of design is that PayFit has created easily modifiable design templates so they can scale design across brand, content and marketing without having to rely on the core design team.

And it’s improved alignment between different departments across the company.

“When it comes to our customer journey, before Figma we weren’t using the same components in both our acquisition website and our product,” says Sylvie Nguyen, Design System Product Designer. “Now, thanks to Figma libraries we are restructuring our components to be shared across experiences. This is already the case for our illustrations library that’s shared between brand and product. The goal is to enable a smoother handover for the customer to the product. The fact that everything is in Figma allows us to prototype and work across two teams.”

Consistency and autonomy across 450 users

As of the beginning of 2023, PayFit had over 100 Figma editors, and 350 viewers across France, the UK, and Spain - and the company has seen an improvement in collaboration, productivity, and consistency. “Whether it’s design, product, engineering or marketing, everyone can work seamlessly in Figma with a shared understanding of their product domain and the company’s vision,” says Eleonore.