Case study · Product Design · HR Tech · Enterprise Dashboard
01
Employee separation involves more than simply marking an employee as exited. It requires coordination across HR, IT, finance, management, and other departments.
Humans Employee Separation Backoffice explores how a structured digital experience can simplify this process: one shared case for every leaver, splitting work into owned tasks and making sure assets, access, and money are settled before anyone closes the record.
02
Employee offboarding shouldn’t be this complicated.
Separation is rarely hard work, it’s hard coordination. Desk research mapped the separation journey and isolated the moments that create delay, risk, and uncertainty. The work takes minutes; the waiting for signatures, owners and forms takes weeks.
Problem areas the product addresses:
03
The work takes minutes. The waiting, for signatures, owners, and the form, takes weeks.
Devices and loan balances appear during clearance, when recovery time has almost gone.
A live account is a blocker. A missed exit interview should never trap the whole case.
Final pay and deductions are the last, most error-prone step, and depend on every team.
04
HR owns the outcome, but the work sits with people across the business who have different priorities and different risk.
One view of status and blockers.
A short, dated handover list.
Early notice and asset context.
Confirmed deductions before cut-off.
A clear checklist and documents.
05
HR needs one shared view that shows who owes what, by when, and what is stopping the case from closing.
06
Building a more structured offboarding experience.
Every leaver gets one case that holds tasks, documents, settlement and history.
Status, blockers and the last-day countdown are visible without opening a case.
Every task points to a team, a named owner and a date.
Overrides follow one rule: an approver, a reason, an audit record.
Overdue tasks and the teams holding them surface first.
A closed case becomes a read-only record with every document issued.
07
The primary user is HR Operations, the case owner, who owns the outcome but not most of the work. Each step below is shown in a designed screen.
HR starts a case from the employee record.
Type, notice, last working day, reason and documents.
Obligations on the record become owned, dated tasks.
Progress, blockers and nudges per team.
Settlement inputs and blockers are resolved before closure.
Documents are issued and the record becomes read-only.
08
Parallel work, one source of truth. Humans pulls obligations at the start, dates every task from the last working day, and surfaces what blocks closure.
| Initiate | Clearance | Settlement | Close | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Employee | Notice | Handover | Return assets | Receive docs |
| Manager | Agree date | Plan handover | Confirm transfer | - |
| HR Ops | Start case | Track blockers | Review settlement | Complete |
| IT / Admin | Schedule | Collect + revoke | Resolve losses | - |
| Payroll | Find balances | Settle obligations | Pay final amount | Confirm |
09
The navigation mirrors how HR works: separations and tasks are the core, and operations modules support them.
Every screen started as a greyscale wireframe to settle hierarchy and layout before visual design.
The five core screens of the separation workflow, from the overview to a completed case.
Urgency before alphabet. The overview tells HR where to chase without opening a case.
Start with what the record already knows.
The whole exit, held in one place.
Every task points to a team and a named owner.
A safer ending, by design.
10
Every interaction should make the process easier.
Counts that need action sit above everything else; detail lives one click away.
A stage tracker, colour-coded badges and progress bars show where a case is, and why it can’t close yet.
Segmented filters, type and department filters, urgency sorting and pagination keep long lists manageable.
Tasks are grouped by team with a named owner and a due date counted back from the last working day.
One set of cards, badges, pills and side panels is reused across every screen.
11
Design the exception, not just the happy path. Every override needs an approver, a reason, and an audit record.
Extend, deduct, or write off with approval.
Move open dates and show the payroll impact.
Revoke access first; make every task due today.
Waive with a reason. Never block completion.
12
One blue for action, status colours used only for status, and pill-shaped controls throughout.
13
The backoffice is designed desktop-first: HR Ops works from dense tables and side-by-side panels. The people who complete tasks, managers and IT, often act on their phones.
14
This is a concept, so these are intended outcomes rather than measured results.
15
Talk to 3–5 HR Ops staff at mid-size Nigerian companies.
Check whether teams accept hard, soft, and optional task rules.
Review off-cycle final pay and the settlement statement with Payroll.
Test manager and IT task views on mobile, where action happens.
16
Enterprise tools rarely fail because a screen is ugly. They fail when the system can’t explain itself, when nobody can say what is done, what is blocked, and why it is safe to close.
Humans replaces invisible handoffs with a case that can answer those questions. Designing it was an exercise in deciding what matters most at each moment, and making the rules, especially the exceptions, visible.
