DASHBOARDS / Payfactors
Payfactors
First UX Hire To PayScale Acquisition
THE PROBLEM
No design foundation. No component patterns. No UX process. As the first and only designer, every pattern established became the product's design language: built from scratch, used in investor and customer demos before a single line of code was written, and validated when PayScale acquired the platform.
HR Technology
Data Visualization
Zero-to-One Design
Compensation Analytics
Responsive
1
Quick
Price
180+
SOLO UX
HIRE
SHIPPED
PRODUCTS
LAUNCHED
AS FREE TOOL
ENTERPRISE CLIENTS
IN 30 DAYS
Led UX design for Payfactors' core compensation tools, including QuickPrice, a free public product designed solo that contributed to the platform's acquisition by PayScale.
WHAT I OWNED
Full UX scope across three core products: QuickPrice, Peer Association, and Job Ranges. All Axure prototyping, recorded monthly into product preview videos by the Head of Product. Every component pattern, interaction model, and design decision made solo as the only designer on the platform.
HOW I WORKED
Built on C# and .NET Framework, hosted on Azure with SQL Server for compensation datasets, Angular and React powering the analytics dashboards and QuickPrice views. High-fidelity Axure prototypes detailed enough to demo as working product. Design was the first deliverable, not the last.
THE CONSTRAINT
Solo designer on a venture-backed startup with no component library, no design system, and no handoff documentation. Every pattern had to be rigorous enough to survive a development handoff and flexible enough to scale across three products built simultaneously.
Prototypes that sold the product before it existed and survived the acquisition.
At an early-stage startup, design isn't just UX, it's product strategy made visible. The Axure prototypes weren't throwaway artifacts. They closed stakeholders, gave engineering a build reference, and after PayScale acquired Payfactors, QuickPrice continued running at scale across the combined platform.
Being the first UX designer means every pattern you establish becomes the product's design language. No system to inherit. You build the one that ships.
QuickPrice
Compensation benchmarking data was regional, lagging, and impossible to trust.
HR compensation data updates once a year, lags behind market movement, and misses emerging job titles. Regional variation compounded the problem: the same role in Boston and St. Louis commands a very different rate. Generic benchmarks couldn't capture that delta.
A free, public tool that became a key reason Payfactors was acquired.
Launched as a fully public free tool, no login required. Intuitive salary benchmarking with regional calibration, fast enough to get an accurate number for any role in any market instantly. QuickPrice became a key selling point in Payfactors' acquisition by PayScale.
Peer Association
Compensation data was dirty, regional, and a year behind market reality.
Analysts needed to compare their compensation data against peer organizations, but no structured view existed. Without a clear way to see peer relationships, compensation decisions were made without competitive context.
A structured peer comparison view that scaled across large job libraries.
A two-column comparison view that made peer relationships immediately legible. Filtered out salary-associated jobs to reduce noise. Analysts could benchmark against peer organizations with confidence for the first time.
Job Ranges
Analysts had no confident way to model or compare job ranges across peer groups.
Compensation analysts needed a flexible way to model job ranges across peer groups, but the interface lacked clarity and filtering logic, making it difficult to configure ranges with confidence or compare them across peer sets efficiently.
A single structured view for modeling and validating ranges across peer sets.
A single structured view for modeling and validating job ranges across peer sets. Two-column layout supported quick comparisons and model configuration. Unassociated jobs filtered out automatically, reducing manual effort and giving analysts a clean, auditable baseline to work from.
What I'd do differently
Establish a lightweight design system earlier. As the only designer, consistency existed because I was consistent, not because the system was documented. Fine at startup scale. As the product and team grew, the lack of a formal component library created friction an actual system would have prevented.