Emplora · Process
The research, personas and flows behind both Emplora case studies — the web platform and the Android app. One discovery pass produced one product on two surfaces; the case studies cover the decisions, this is the work underneath them.
02 — User Research
Five roles that appear in every 50–500 person company, synthesised from review corpora and industry surveys. Two of them buy; all five live with the result.
03 — Business Challenges
Six pain points, grouped from review corpora and industry surveys. They are not independent — each one compounds the next.
6.17 providers per employee lifecycle; 77% of organisations split people data across multiple HCM databases. The result is repetitive manual entry and no single source of truth.
If employees still need three systems, two logins and a manager's help to complete a basic task, the queue has not been removed — it has been moved. Frontline staff without a desktop are hit hardest.
45% of HR leaders lose more than half their week to admin, crowding out the strategic work they were hired to do — and were promised software would free them for.
Hiring, performance, engagement and compensation data live apart, so attrition and comp-equity risk are only visible after they have already cost money.
Systems integration ranks second among HR-professional pain points. Point solutions silo by default, and every connection between them is its own project.
82% of HR-tech deployments report adoption challenges. The root cause is interface quality and task friction, not training budget — which is why this is a design problem.
04 — Secondary Research
The gap that falls out of this: the upper-right quadrant of depth versus self-serve is empty. Darwinbox has the depth but needs a sales cycle; BambooHR has the ease but hits a ceiling around a hundred people. Nobody occupies both — which is the 50–500 "graduation gap", and Emplora's beachhead.
07 — User Flow
The flow the whole product exists to make possible: a 60-day warning that ends in a specific action assigned to a specific person, not a chart.
08 — Toolkits
Design and build were the same loop on this project, so the toolkit spans both.
Five phases, each producing a document the next one is accountable to. The point of writing them down was that later decisions could be checked against earlier reasoning instead of relitigated.
Eight-platform teardown — BambooHR, Rippling, Deel, Zoho People, Darwinbox, Keka, Gusto, Workday — scored on price, real strength and where each one breaks. Positioned the depth/self-serve quadrant and found the empty corner.
Deliverable: market sizing, feature parity matrix, six ranked pain points, four strategic wedges.
Empathy maps for the three daily roles, five field observations, a problem statement, five point-of-view statements, and a How-Might-We set grouped by consolidation, agency, adoption, mobile and trust. Concepts scored on impact × feasibility.
Deliverable: five personas with feature traceability, prioritisation matrix, seven success metrics with baselines and targets.
Organised by employee lifecycle rather than by internal department, under three rules: every screen is a view onto one record; depth capped at three levels for zero-recall; and every node reachable by typing, so hierarchy never becomes a memory test.
Deliverable: sitemap, desktop/tablet/mobile nav models, RBAC matrix, URL scheme, content model, five key flows.
Tokens pulled from Figma through the MCP server rather than transcribed by hand — colour, type, spacing, radii and the Untitled UI skeuomorphic button ring, which is what stops the buttons reading as flat. Motion specified as a named vocabulary so no component invents its own easing.
Deliverable: token spec, component inventory (primitives, composites, shell), motion spec, accessibility baseline — AA body text, 44px targets, reduced-motion honoured globally.
One Next.js codebase, statically exported and wrapped in Capacitor for Android. Authorisation enforced by Postgres RLS rather than application code, so a query the app never wrote still cannot leak another tenant's roster.
Deliverable: live web app, Android build, 18 RLS checks signed in as real users, 58 end-to-end API checks, deployment runbook.