Entertainment Workforce Management Platform
Designed and architected a workforce management platform for the entertainment industry, bringing complex payroll and compliance workflows into a unified mobile experience. Through client research and iterative usability testing, the platform achieved 5.0/5.0 satisfaction scores for ease of use and task completion while supporting union agreements, production-specific contracts, and jurisdiction-based labor requirements. The self-service experience simplifies crew onboarding and time entry without sacrificing payroll accuracy or compliance.
Measured through iterative crew usability testing sessions and production pilot tracking.
CHALLENGE
Entertainment payroll sits at the intersection of workforce management, labor compliance, and production operations. Crew members must navigate complex onboarding requirements, varying union agreements, state-specific labor laws, overtime calculations, meal penalties, work classifications, and production-specific pay structures. The challenge was creating a simple, intuitive experience capable of supporting highly dynamic payroll scenarios without exposing users to the complexity behind them.
SOLUTION
Designed and architected a mobile-first onboarding and time entry platform that conceals sophisticated business logic behind effortless user workflows. Conducted extensive discovery research and usability testing to identify friction points across the crew experience, then developed adaptive interaction models and decision frameworks capable of supporting hundreds of payroll scenarios. Created the complete workflow architecture, screen logic, and user experience strategy for onboarding, document collection, time capture, and payroll submission, enabling crew members to complete critical tasks with confidence while ensuring compliance with complex union, production, and jurisdictional requirements.
MY ROLE
An agency delivered the first design pass. I picked it up, ran with it, and took full ownership of the product's UX architecture through production and launch. As Principal UX Designer at Extreme Reach, I led end-to-end UX for both the production-manager desktop platform and the crew-facing mobile app: discovery, journey mapping, information architecture, interaction design, and design-system alignment across desktop and iOS/Android. I re-evaluated and refactored the baseline flows against real-world entertainment payroll constraints, then designed the full system expansion: net-new use cases, edge-case state machines, union compliance rules, and the crew usability research behind them.
HOW I OWNED IT
The boundary of my ownership, from inherited concept to shipped system.
An external agency delivered the first concept: a high-level visual pass covering ideal-path time entry. It read well in a deck and stopped there.
Entertainment payroll cannot ship on happy paths alone. I audited the initial models for gaps in union overtime, meal penalties, multi-day episodic splits, and allowance caps, then rebuilt the flows around the rules the concept never accounted for.
With the agency long gone, I owned the surface end to end: re-architected entry flows for crew members with low digital adoption, designed the full ecosystem of net-new screens and use cases across offers, timecards, revisions, and exception handling, and drove all ongoing crew research and iterative usability testing.
Authored production-ready acceptance criteria and Lovable interactive prototypes, so engineering built against working interaction logic rather than static mockups.
STRATEGIC DECISIONS
The constraints, tradeoffs, and decisions that changed the direction of the work.
Crew payroll involves thousands of rule permutations, bi-weekly vs. weekly pay cycles, single-day vs. multi-day episodic coding, idle day rules, mileage allowance caps, far more scope than could ship in one pass.
Phased the rollout by scenario complexity, sequencing core logging flows first and layering in edge-case rules (multi-episodic coding, idle day/mileage logic) in later releases, letting crews start logging time digitally without waiting for full rule coverage.
The system requires complete transparency between what's being calculated (payroll rules, allowances, caps) and what's being recorded, but the primary user is often a crew member in their 50s on a basic phone, resistant to digital tools and needing near-zero friction to adopt the app at all.
Designed the crew-facing UI to hide calculation complexity entirely, simple, minimal-tap entry, while surfacing full rule transparency and audit trail on the admin/payroll side, so accuracy and trust didn't come at the cost of adoption by the least digitally-comfortable users.
Crews expected the digital experience to mirror the paper timesheet they'd always used, but a timesheet's dense, landscape, row-and-column format doesn't translate to a small mobile screen.
Moved away from replicating the paper layout toward a simplified, mobile-native entry flow, validated through repeated rounds of usability testing to ensure the new format was intuitive and error-proof despite breaking from the familiar mental model.
Traditional wireframe-to-spec handoff cycles moved too slowly for a payroll domain where stakeholders could only judge feasibility by seeing real interaction logic.
Built and iterated the crew mobile experience directly in Lovable, concept to testable prototype in days rather than weeks, with stakeholders reviewing working software instead of static mockups, accelerating alignment without sacrificing rigor in the underlying payroll logic.
Rapid AI-native prototyping risked leaving engineering without a testable definition of done for rules-heavy features.
Authored detailed requirements and acceptance criteria alongside the interactive prototypes, pairing prototyping speed with traditional spec rigor, reducing implementation back-and-forth and giving engineering unambiguous clarity.
IMPACT
- ★Perfect 5.0 / 5.0 ease-of-use and task-completion scores in usability testing
- ★Supports union and non-union productions across jurisdictions
- ★Rules-driven workflow engine handling hundreds of payroll scenarios
- ★First native iOS + Android crew app in the category