PAYCOM
Project Arc: Designing the Foundation for a Modern Product Ecosystem
Project Arc was a company-wide initiative to modernize Paycom's product experience by unifying the design language. What began as a visual refresh quickly evolved into an organizational challenge requiring alignment across design, engineering, research, and leadership.
Selected as one of five designers to lead the initiative as the Core Team, I helped shape both the product direction and operational strategy behind Project Arc. My responsibilities included defining design principles, making and guiding hundreds of iterations, planning the project rollout, and facilitating communication between geographically distributed teams to align the project around a shared vision.
Timeline
2025 Q2 - 2026 Q3
My role
Product Designer
Team
Arc Core Team
…and the entire Design Team!
Skills
Design Systems, Strategic Vision, UX research, Workshop Facilitation, Design Operations, Project Planning
Context
Paycom's products had evolved over many years across multiple technology stacks, resulting in separate design systems for React, legacy MVC applications, desktop/mobile experiences, and user-specific tools. This fragmented ecosystem created inconsistent user experiences and an increasingly outdated visual language.
Project Arc was initiated by executive request to establish a single "modern" design foundation, capable of reflecting Paycom's reputation for innovation, while supporting long-term scalability across every product.
Challenge
The challenge wasn't simply to redesign the design system — it was to align an entire organization around a new design language.
The project began with almost no predefined roadmap, timeline, or implementation strategy. Our design team was tasked to define the vision, establish a process, and create a scalable system while balancing user needs, engineering constraints, and business priorities.
With such stakes in mind, it was crucial that we laid a clear foundation before we started design.
Research
Our first objective was understanding what "modern" should mean for Paycom. With guidance from our Design Systems team, we conducted stakeholder interviews with executives, principal product managers, engineers, and design leaders to define the qualities our brand should communicate. Across the interviews, following themes consistently emerged.
Human-Centered
Design choices should prioritize empathy and real user needs. The product should feel helpful, not cold or transactional.
Purpose Driven
Every visual element should exist for a purpose. Personality is welcomed only when it adds to clarity and meaning.
Trustworthy
The UI should feel stable, reliable, and safe, since our product is a professional software handling thousands of critical personal data.
Bold
We should express confidence as leaders of the HR industry. It means intentional impact through uniqueness, voice, and overall design vision.
Innovative
We move forward with purpose, using creativity to solve problems in new, meaningful ways. Our design should feel fresh and progressive.
Simple
Design should reflect clarity and focus, removing friction and guiding users with with seamless usability.
Design Strategy
With a clearer direction established, we facilitated collaborative workshops across the Paycom Design Team to translate the brand attributes into actionable design principles. Our goal was to progressively refine these principles into reusable patterns and, ultimately, into design tokens that would form the foundation of the new design system.
Then, the Core Team rapidly explored multiple visual directions through individual design explorations and regular critiques. This phase prioritized creative exploration over implementation constraints, allowing us to challenge existing conventions and uncover the strongest direction before considering technical feasibility.
My Take
After rounds of research, iterations, critiques, and revisions, following are high-fidelity mockups of the dashboard to reflect my take on project Arc.
User Feedback
To evaluate early concepts, we conducted moderated UserTesting sessions with the help of the Research team. 50+ participants were interviewed with questions focusing on first impressions, perceived trustworthiness, and overall usability.
Among multiple design explorations, my concept received the strongest participant preference and became a primary reference point for refining the visual language. Insights gathered through testing informed the evolution of design tokens, interaction patterns, and component standards as the project progressed.
Next Steps
After the concept was crystalized with strong foundation, Project Arc was presented to the executives, transitioning from concept exploration into a collaborative implementation effort spanning the entire organization.
Working closely with the Design Systems Team, we translated validated concepts into reusable tokens and component standards — from layout to buttons to widgets. As the project expanded beyond the Core Team, I served as a communication bridge between the Arc Core Team and the broader design organization by facilitating design reviews, synthesizing feedback, mentoring designers through iterations, and driving decisions that balanced consistency, scalability, and technical feasibility.
Iterations of a more specific use case of Quick Actions and widgets
Alongside these organizational efforts, I continued refining design concepts, conducting usability testing, and creating executive presentations to communicate project direction and roadmap. Through this process, I gained deeper experience in large-scale system migration strategies, particularly the challenge of transitioning legacy products into a unified design foundation.
Key Takeaways
Project Arc fundamentally changed how I approach product design. I learned that scaling design is less about creating more components and more about creating alignment — between people, systems, and long-term product vision.
Leading within a highly visible initiative strengthened my ability to navigate ambiguity, and transform broad strategic goals into practical systems that hundreds of designers and engineers could build upon together.
Project Arc was driven by the collective creativity and collaboration of the full Design Team.
I'm grateful to have worked alongside such a talented group throughout this initiative.