DASHBOARDS / PayFactors HR Payroll Tools
Payfactors — First UX Hire to PayScale Acquisition
THE PROBLEM
The first UX designer at a compensation analytics startup building the product foundation before a single line of code.
Payfactors had no design foundation, no component patterns, and 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.
THE CORE TENSION
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.
MY ROLE
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
Payfactors ran on C# and .NET Framework, hosted on Azure with SQL Server for compensation datasets. Angular and React powered the analytics dashboards and QuickPrice interactive views.
HOW I WORKED
High-fidelity Axure prototypes detailed enough to demo as working product — recorded monthly into product preview videos by the Head of Product. Design was the first deliverable, not the last.
THE CONSTRAINT
PayScale acquired Payfactors, combining datasets and algorithms into a unified compensation engine. The interfaces I designed continued to support compensation strategy across the merged platform.
"Being the first UX designer means every pattern you establish becomes the product's design language. There's no system to inherit — you build the one that ships."
PROTOTYPE
QuickPrice
PROBLEM
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.
OUTCOME
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.
PROTOTYPE
Peer Association
PROBLEM
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.
OUTCOME
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 — no manual cross-referencing required.
PROTOTYPE
Job Ranges
PROBLEM
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.
OUTCOME
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 baseline to work from with confidence.
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. That worked at startup scale. As the product and team grew, the lack of a formal component library created friction that an actual system would have prevented.