UX Improvements for Creditas Payroll Loans

Product Strategy

UX Research

Interaction Design

Information Architecture

Redesigned the employee termination flow in the Creditas HR Portal, reducing operational errors and improving debt recovery. Over the course of three months, I led the discovery process, expanded the solution scope, and delivered UX improvements alongside workflow automation.

Context

Creditas' Benefits Business Unit offered payroll loans to employees through their employers. When an employee left the company, the HR team needed to calculate how much of the outstanding loan balance could legally be deducted from the employee's severance payment.

At the time, Creditas was focused on reaching breakeven, prioritizing initiatives with a direct impact on reducing operational costs and increasing revenue recovery. This project was prioritized as a quick win due to its potential to deliver fast business impact and reduce financial losses during the employee termination process.

Problem

The employee termination flow was short and consisted of only a few steps, yet it generated a high volume of questions from HR teams, leading to support tickets, financial losses caused by calculation errors, and increased operational costs.

The primary issue already identified by the team was a toggle that required HR users to decide whether a future payroll deduction should be kept. This manual decision often led to mistakes, causing a loan installment to be unintentionally skipped.

When I joined the project, removing this toggle had already been prioritized by automating the decision based on the employee's termination date. However, during discovery, I found that the toggle was only one part of the problem. The overall experience also suffered from usability issues, excessive information, and poor visual hierarchy, increasing the cognitive load on HR teams while completing the task.

Discovery

To understand the end-to-end employee termination flow, I conducted interviews with Creditas' operations teams and HR professionals from companies of different sizes.

Over the course of one week, I conducted more than 10 interviews and observed HR teams completing real termination workflows in the platform. This helped me understand their working context and identify opportunities beyond the planned removal of the toggle.

Key learnings

Although the workflow was relatively simple, it was time-consuming, especially for companies with high employee turnover.
HR teams constantly switched between different systems and vendors, increasing their cognitive load throughout the process.
The interface suffered from information overload, poor readability, and weak visual hierarchy.
Larger companies also expressed the need for automation to support bulk employee terminations.

Interviews with HR professionals.

Expanding the Solution Scope

Beyond automating the toggle, I proposed UX improvements that could be implemented by the front-end team independently of the backend changes. The redesign focused on four key goals:

Reduce cognitive load

Less information displayed on each screen
Eliminate unnecessary scrolling
Improve visual hierarchy

Provide better context throughout the flow

Keep the employee's name and Brazilian ID (CPF) visible at all times
Display the calculation date on the confirmation screen

Improve readability

Refine typography
Increase color contrast
Reorganize supporting content

Simplify navigation

Reduce the number of steps
Improve button labels and microcopy
Reorganize available actions

Termination flow modal: before and after.

Calculation modal: before and after.

Beyond the main workflow, I identified another opportunity during the interviews: to check an employee's outstanding loan balance, HR teams had to start a termination simulation. I proposed a dedicated section for this information, reducing unnecessary steps in a frequent task.

Employee list with an "Outstanding balance" action.

Results

Approximately 30% reduction in task completion time.
Eliminated errors related to skipped loan installments by automating the business rule.
Improved debt recovery during the employee termination process.
Reduced support tickets and operational rework.

In follow-up interviews after launch, HR teams reported that the workflow felt faster and easier to use, requiring less cognitive effort during a task they performed frequently. The insights from this project also helped shape a roadmap of automation initiatives for companies with high employee turnover.

Key Learnings

Operational problems are rarely caused by a single interface component.
Observing users performing real tasks uncovered opportunities that wouldn't have emerged from metrics or support tickets alone.
Small UX improvements combined with business rule changes can drive meaningful operational and financial impact.

2026 Gabriela Pinheiro

Curitiba, Brasil