CASE STUDY · MORGAN STANLEY
HR E360
Employee 360 Dashboard
A consolidated enterprise dashboard for internal HR teams to understand employee context — performance, compensation, career path, and risk factors — and take informed action.
ROLE
Principal UX Designer
USERS
HR business partners, compensation analysts, talent management leads
PLATFORM
Internal enterprise web application
FOCUS
Data visualization, information architecture, role-based views, timeline visualization, action workflows
TOOLS
Figma, user research, wireframes, prototypes, design system
CONFIDENTIALITY NOTE
Some details, screens, and workflows are recreated or generalized to protect confidential information while preserving the design challenge, process, and decision-making approach.
Situation
Business context
HR managers lacked a unified view of employee performance and compensation history, leading to inconsistent decision-making during review and compensation cycles.
User context
HR business partners needed to quickly assess an employee's full context — performance, compensation, career path, and risk factors — in a single view, without manually assembling data from multiple systems.
System context
Employee data was distributed across performance management, compensation, and talent systems with no single point of access — creating fragmentation, inconsistency, and slow decision-making.
Design Challenge
Create a 360-degree employee view that surfaces historical trends alongside real-time performance indicators — supporting consistent, well-informed HR decisions across performance reviews, compensation cycles, and talent planning.
Data fragmentation
HR partners manually assembled employee profiles from multiple disconnected systems before every decision point — a time-consuming and error-prone process.
Inconsistent decisions
Without a unified view, similar employees received different treatment depending on which data the reviewer happened to find or have access to.
Slow review process
The review and compensation cycle was slowed by manual data gathering across systems — requiring HR partners to piece together context from scattered sources.
My Role
What I led
Information architecture and data visualization strategy for the consolidated employee 360 view — defining how data from multiple systems would be organized, prioritized, and displayed.
What I designed
The 360 dashboard layout, career timeline visualization, contextual data cards, performance and compensation modules, risk and retention indicators, and the role-based progressive disclosure system.
Who I partnered with
HR business partners, compensation analysts, talent management leads, data engineering teams, and compliance stakeholders.
Making the Workflow Visible
Interviewed HR business partners to understand the critical data points needed during compensation cycles, performance reviews, and talent planning conversations — mapping when and how each data element influences real decisions.
Exploring the Experience
Career timeline visualization
Explored visual treatments for career progression, role changes, and compensation history displayed over time.
Contextual data cards
Tested modular card layouts for grouping related employee data — performance, compensation, engagement, and risk.
Role-based views
Designed adaptive layouts that show different data depending on the viewer's role and permission level.
Peer comparison mode
Prototyped side-by-side employee comparisons for calibration sessions during review cycles.
Action integration
Connected insights directly to HR action workflows — initiating reviews, adjustments, and talent actions from the dashboard.
PII & data sensitivity
Designed progressive disclosure for sensitive data like compensation, ensuring appropriate access controls and privacy.
The Solution
A centralized 360 dashboard that serves as the single source of truth for employee-related decisions — organized into contextual modules that surface the right data at the right moment, with role-based access and direct action integration.
Employee overview
At-a-glance summary of role, tenure, current performance rating, and key risk indicators for quick context.
Career timeline
Visual timeline showing promotions, role changes, lateral moves, and compensation history across the employee's career.
Performance module
Current and historical performance data with trend indicators, goal tracking, and manager assessment context.
Compensation view
Salary, bonus, and equity data with peer comparison context and historical compensation trajectory.
Risk & retention
Flight risk indicators, engagement signals, retention factors, and proactive alerts for at-risk employees.
Action center
Direct links to initiate performance reviews, compensation adjustments, promotions, and other talent actions.
Key Design Decisions
Contextual data grouping
Timeline-first visualization
Role-based progressive disclosure
Inline action triggers
Impact
USER IMPACT
HR partners gained a single, trusted view of each employee — eliminating the manual data assembly that previously preceded every review and compensation conversation.
BUSINESS IMPACT
More consistent and better-informed decisions during performance reviews and compensation cycles, with less dependency on individual reviewer knowledge.
OPERATIONAL IMPACT
Reduced preparation time for review cycles by consolidating fragmented data sources into a unified, always-current employee view.
PRODUCT IMPACT
Established a reusable "360 view" design pattern that was later adopted by other internal enterprise tools requiring consolidated entity views.
Reflection
What I learned
The success of this project was rooted in simplifying complex, multi-system data into narrative-driven insights that map directly to real HR decisions — not just displaying data, but organizing it around the decisions it needs to support.
What I would improve
I would push harder on customizable layouts so different HR personas could prioritize the data modules that matter most to their specific role and workflow — one size doesn't fit all HR partners.
How this shaped my approach
This project reinforced that enterprise dashboards succeed when they organize around decisions, not data sources. The question is never "what data do we have?" — it's "what decision does this user need to make right now?"
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