Content design case study
Redesigning Kuda's Payroll Experience
COMPANY
Kuda
ROLE
Content Designer / UX Writer
EXPERTISE
Content Design · UX Writing · Complex Journeys
YEAR
2023
23% reduction in customer support requests
The redesign covered the payroll experience across onboarding, configuration, payments, notifications and account management.
THE PROBLEM
Payroll wasn’t simply a complicated workflow. It was a content design problem.
Customers had to understand multiple decisions, deadlines, people and system states as they set up, ran and managed payroll.
The content needed to help them understand
what they needed to do
what would happen next
what a payment or payroll status meant
what to do when payroll did not go as planned
how deadlines, roles and approvals affected the experience
how to add or manage employees during an active cycle
When those moments were unclear, customers needed support.
The challenge
How might we make the end-to-end payroll experience easier to understand, so businesses could confidently manage employees, payments and exceptions?
MY ROLE
I designed content across the end-to-end payroll journey, not just individual screens.
As the Content Designer, I worked with Product, Design, Engineering and Research to identify and resolve content-related friction across onboarding, setup, payment states, notifications and account management.
My contribution included:
UNDERSTANDING THE JOURNEY
Set up payroll → Add employees → Configure payroll → Run payroll → Track payments → Manage exceptions.
I treated payroll as a connected journey, focusing on the moments where customers needed to understand:
What do I need to do?
What happens next?
What does this status mean?
What happens if something goes wrong?
researching user needs and pain points
testing content and flows with users
shaping onboarding and setup experiences
clarifying payroll settings and payment states
designing notifications and guidance around deadlines
writing content for edge cases and exceptions
iterating on the experience based on post-launch feedback
I owned the content design work that made the experience coherent from initial setup through payroll completion and post-launch iteration.
RESEARCH
Research → insight → content-design approach
Research revealed that payroll friction wasn’t concentrated in one screen. It happened at moments where customers had to make decisions, understand system states, or recover from exceptions. That shifted my approach from improving individual pieces of microcopy to designing clearer guidance across the entire payroll journey.
Competitive review
I reviewed existing payroll experiences to identify common patterns and gaps across onboarding, employee management, status communication and deadline guidance. This helped identify opportunities to make Kuda’s payroll experience clearer and easier to manage.
DESIGN DECISIONS
As the Content Designer and UX Writer, I worked with the product designer to make the payroll journey easier to understand. The content strategy focused on three connected decisions:
Making payroll settings easier to understand
We introduced a Payroll Frequency option, offering users the flexibility to choose between bi-weekly or monthly payment schedules. I wrote clear guidance so businesses could choose a schedule that fit their needs and understand the consequences of that choice.
Clarifying payment and status communication
The product offered two disbursement options:
Automatic Payroll-Runs: Payments processed automatically on pre-scheduled dates.
Manual Payroll-Runs: Payments initiated manually, supported by an integrated reminder feature to prevent missed deadlines.
I designed the instructional content to help customers choose a pay-run approach, understand deadlines and take the next step with confidence.
Supporting employee onboarding
To scale for businesses of all sizes, the platform allowed:
Individual employee additions for MSMEs.
Bulk employee uploads for larger organisations.
I created approachable, instructional content that helped businesses add and manage employees, whether they were onboarding one person or using a bulk upload.
DESIGNING FOR EDGE CASES
The initial design addressed key moments in the payroll journey. Post-launch feedback then showed where customers needed clearer guidance when exceptions occurred.
Manual payroll: post-launch iteration
INITIAL SOLUTION
Manual payroll runs included a reminder feature to support customers ahead of their payroll date.
FEEDBACK / OBSERVATION
Manual payroll runs created a risk of missed deadlines, even with an existing reminder. Feedback showed that a single reminder didn’t account for the different roles involved in completing a manual payroll run, including admins, initiators and approvers.
PROBLEM
A single reminder did not give customers enough visibility into what had happened or what to do next when a payroll deadline passed.
ITERATION
I iterated on the experience by introducing scheduled alerts, post-payroll notifications and a clearer “Delayed Payroll” status:
Allowing users to schedule alerts days before payroll dates.
Introducing post-payroll notifications with a “Delayed Payroll” status, reminding users for several days after the deadline.
OUTCOME: The experience became clearer and more actionable, giving customers better visibility into what had happened and what to do next.
For new employees mid-cycle
We changed the experience so businesses could add new hires to an ongoing payroll run, with content that explained how the system handled the calculation.
Automatically calculates pay based on start dates and disbursement schedules.
Simplified workflows, reducing manual adjustments and errors.
I crafted contextual microcopy to explain partial payment calculations and reassure customers about what the system was doing.
THE RESULT
The redesigned payroll experience contributed to a 23% reduction in customer support requests.
By improving guidance across onboarding, payroll configuration, payment states, notifications and edge cases, the experience gave customers clearer information about what to do, what was happening and what to expect next.
REFLECTION
This project changed how I think about content design in complex products. The work wasn’t just about making individual screens clearer. It was about understanding how user actions, system behaviour, states and next steps connect — and designing content that helps users navigate the whole experience.