Software that didn’t bend
HR teams had to change their processes to fit the tool. Every company works differently, and the tools ignored it.
Designing an AI-assisted HR platform from zero to one — DrHR case study
DrHR gives small and mid-sized businesses a whole HR department in one product: hiring, onboarding, people records, documents and performance reviews, with AI doing the busywork. I led its design end to end, from the first stakeholder interviews to a live product featured in the LA Times.
- DrHR webHR, managers, employees
- DrHR mobileEmployee self-service
0 → 1Designed end to end, from a blank canvas
+15%Task completion after the IA redesign
3Review levels: employee, manager and HR
2Apps: web for HR and managers, mobile for every employee
≤100Employees — the SMB sweet spot it was built for
An HR department, in one product
What DrHR is
DrHR is an AI-assisted HR platform for small and mid-sized businesses in the US. It covers the whole employee lifecycle — hiring, onboarding and offboarding, people records, documents, announcements and performance reviews — so a growing company doesn’t have to build an HR department before it can afford one.
Who uses it
Three very different people use the same product: HR managers who run the processes, team managers who hire and review their people, and employees who want answers without waiting on HR. Founders and C-suites use it to see the whole company at a glance.
What the market got wrong
The founder’s brief was simple: small businesses should spend their money on growth, not on heavy HR software. The tools they could buy were either too rigid, too thin or too expensive.
Performance reviews as a dead end
Managers rated employees and that was the end of it. Employees had no voice, no history and no idea how they were judged.
HR in five places
Spreadsheets, email threads, PDFs and chat. Nobody could see who was hired, who had which laptop, or which review was still pending.
Enterprise weight, enterprise price
The powerful suites were dense and priced for big companies. The simple ones ran out of road as soon as a team grew.
Busywork AI can take
Job descriptions, first-pass application reviews and repeated policy questions are high-volume and rules-based — a natural fit for AI.
Employees who don’t need to ask
Org charts, calendars, personnel files and reviews in the employee’s own hands take a big share of the load off HR.
How the work ran
- Discovery
Stakeholders, HR teams and the market
Sessions with the founder and leadership, interviews with HR professionals across industries, workflow mapping and a teardown of the leading HR tools.
- Structure
One information architecture for three roles
Mapped every module to what HR, managers and employees each need, so one product could serve all three without three products’ worth of navigation.
- Exploration
Sketch, compare, converge
Several wireframe concepts per module, critiqued with stakeholders, then combined into one direction — performance reviews first.
- Design & system
High-fidelity UI and a shared system
The visual language, components and patterns for web and mobile, built so the team could ship module after module consistently.
- Launch
Live, and in the press
DrHR went live for US small businesses and was featured by the Los Angeles Times in May 2025.
What HR teams actually needed
Before designing anything, we spent time with the people who would live in the product every day — and with the founder, who had run a software company herself.
Methods
- Stakeholder sessions with the founder and leadership
- Interviews with HR professionals across industries
- Workflow mapping of hiring, onboarding and reviews
- Competitive teardown: Keka, BambooHR, Monday.com
- Proto-persona: the HR manager in a growing company
- Wireframe critiques with stakeholders
Key insights
Customisation is the product
Every organisation runs HR its own way. The software had to adapt to their workflows — not the other way round.
If it needs training, it failed
HR managers didn’t have time to decode complex screens. Powerful had to still mean obvious.
AI should assist, not replace
People wanted smarter suggestions but were wary of AI that felt impersonal or took decisions away from them.
Feedback has to flow both ways
Reviews that only go top-down breed mistrust. Employees wanted a voice and managers wanted to be reviewed fairly too.
Design Lead. End to end, zero to one.
“I owned DrHR’s design from the first stakeholder conversation to the live product — the research, the structure, every module and the system the team built on.”
- Discovery with the founder, leadership and HR professionals
- Competitive analysis and the proto-persona
- Information architecture across HR, manager and employee roles
- Wireframe concepts, critiques and convergence for each module
- High-fidelity UI for web and the mobile app
- The DrHR brand identity — logomark, colour, type and guidelines
- The visual language and design system from 0 → 1
- Leading and reviewing the designers working on the product
- Handoff and build support with engineering
- Stage
- 0 → 1, through launch
- Users
- HR managers · Team managers · Employees
- Market
- US small and mid-sized businesses
- Team
- Founder · PM · engineers · design team I led
- Tools
- Figma, FigJam, Photoshop, Illustrator
The whole employee lifecycle, in one place
Every module I designed, across web and mobile, for three kinds of user.
Dashboard
What needs attention today — headcount, reviews, open jobs, announcements, holidays and quick actions.
Employees
People records, org chart and personnel files, with role-based access to sensitive data.
Recruitment
Job posts with AI-drafted descriptions, applications, interview stages and offer letters signed online.
Onboarding & offboarding
Guided checklists that also track equipment and system access, so nothing walks out the door.
Performance
Three-level reviews — self, manager and HR — with history, analytics, praise and improvement plans.
Notification centre
Company-wide announcements and HR updates that reach everyone instantly.
Library
Policies and company documents in one searchable place.
Reports
People, hiring and review reports for HR and leadership.
DrHR AI assistant
Answers questions and drafts the routine work, always for a person to review.
Messages & channels
Team channels, direct messages and threads, so HR conversations don’t live in another tool.
Praise
Public recognition anyone can give, shown on the person’s profile and in their reviews.
Mobile app
Employee self-service on iOS and Android: profile, team, praise, performance, events and messages.
Performance reviews that flow both ways
In most HR tools, a performance review is a one-way street: a supervisor fills in a form and the employee finds out later. Managers are never reviewed, employees never get to explain, and nobody can see a trend over time.
I sketched three directions. The first was a simple list of reports — clear, but one-directional. The second added a self-review so employees could give their side. The third gave employees their own analytics, so a review became something they could act on.
Each solved part of the problem, and feedback on all three made the answer obvious: combine them. The final design gives every employee a review report, a self-review and a view of their own progress across the year.
The problem
- Reviews went top-down only, so employees had no voice and little trust in the outcome.
- There was no history — nobody could see whether someone was improving.
- Managers themselves were never reviewed, which hid problems in leadership.
What I designed
- A review report with ratings compared across the year, average rating, praise and focused improvement areas.
- A self-review form where employees rate themselves and add context to every answer, not just a score.
- Past reports with a full sign-off log — who reviewed, who completed and who signed off, and when.
Why this, not thatI didn’t ship the simplest version. One-directional reviews were faster to build, but they would have repeated the exact problem DrHR set out to fix.
Giving managers and HR the full picture
Once reviews flowed in every direction, someone had to keep them moving. Managers needed to review their team and see what was still pending. HR needed to see the whole organisation and make the final call.
For HR I explored several dashboard directions on paper. I dropped a department performance graph that looked good but didn’t help anyone decide anything, added a separate list of top managers so leadership was judged too, and added sign-off progress for every team manager.
The result is two focused views: one where managers review and track their own team, and one where HR sees who is excelling, who needs support and what is still waiting for sign-off.
The problem
- HR chased managers by hand to find out which reviews were done.
- Top performers were picked from memory, which favoured whoever was most visible.
- Underperformance was spotted late, when it was already a problem.
What I designed
- A manager view to review and rate the team — across departments — and track every review to final sign-off.
- An organisation dashboard: performance at a glance, top performers and top managers each month and year, and improvement plans in one place.
- A review-progress dashboard, so HR sees completion and sign-offs without chasing anyone.
Why this, not thatI kept HR’s dashboard about decisions, not tasks. Peer reviews for HR, automated monthly email reports, visual progress timelines and PIP reminders on every dashboard were all explored — and all cut, because each one added noise to a screen that needed to stay clear.
AI that does the busywork, not the deciding
The founder’s goal was for a small business to run HR in far less time. AI was the way to get there — but research had already told us people didn’t want an HR tool that felt cold or took decisions away from them.
So the rule was simple: AI drafts, people decide. It writes the first version of a job description, takes the first pass at a stack of applications and answers the questions employees would otherwise send to HR. Every output is editable, and nothing goes out without a person saying so.
The assistant sits one click away on every screen, so it helps in the moment without pulling anyone out of what they were doing.
The problem
- HR spent hours on repeat work: job descriptions, screening and the same policy questions.
- Bolted-on chatbots in other tools felt generic and disconnected from the company’s own rules.
- Teams worried that AI would act on their behalf without asking.
What I designed
- An assistant that is always one click away and works inside the current task.
- AI drafts for hiring — job descriptions and first-pass reviews of applications — ready to edit.
- Clear human control: every AI output can be edited, and nothing is sent or applied without approval.
Why this, not thatI didn’t make AI autonomous. In HR, one wrong automated message can damage trust in a way no time saving makes up for.
HR in every employee’s pocket
HR teams don’t sit at a desk all day, and most employees never open an HR dashboard. So the employee side of DrHR lives on the phone — answering the questions people used to send to HR.
Employee self-service
Everything an employee asks HR for, answered on their phone.
Profile, team, praise, performance, documents, events and messages in one app — so HR stops being the company help desk.
- Mobile app
- Self-service
- Messaging
- Recognition
Sign-in & onboarding
Sign in, verify with a one-time code, then a short “craft your profile” step new joiners can skip and finish later.
Home
A morning greeting, an inbox that says what needs attention, upcoming holidays and the organisation feed.
Announcements
Company news filtered by organisation, with likes and comments so updates become conversations.
Events
Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays and company events in a calendar or a list, with a quick message to send wishes.
Profile, team & timeline
Personal details, the reporting line up to the next-level manager and a timeline of every role change.
Praise
Give recognition with a category and a note; it shows on the person’s profile and feeds their reviews.
My performance
Average rating and every monthly report, ready to download.
Messages & channels
Team channels, direct messages and threads — company conversations without another chat tool.
Platform screenshots
What made this hard
Flexible, but simple
HR teams wanted control over workflows, templates and permissions — without the complexity that usually comes with it. Smart defaults with configuration tucked one level down gave them both.
One product, three audiences
HR, managers and employees need very different things from the same data. Role-based views kept each screen about the person looking at it.
Inclusive, but with clear authority
Reviews had to flow both ways without blurring who makes the final call. HR keeps the last word; everyone else gets a voice.
Dense data, calm screens
Reviews, people and hiring generate a lot of data. Separate pages for tracking, summaries first and details on demand kept HR from drowning.
Trust in AI
Helpful AI and HR that feels personal pull in different directions. Drafts and suggestions — never silent actions — kept both.
Built to grow
Sized for teams of up to 100 people, but structured so bigger companies wouldn’t outgrow it.
A brand first, then a system
DrHR needed an identity before it needed screens. The logomark joins a human head with circuitry — people first, powered by technology — and the same greens carry through every screen on web and mobile.
- Logomark
- A stylised human head wired with circuitry, in a light-to-dark green gradient (#A1D99B → #58A754 → #1B5637), with structure, spacing and clear-space rules.
- Colour
- Dark Green #086C4F, Light Lime Green #BCFF62 and Middle Green #47A153, with Very Dark Gray #1C1C1C and white for contrast.
- Typography
- The wordmark is set in Arya Bold; the interface uses a clean, geometric sans built for dense tables and forms.
- Components & accessibility
- Cards, data tables, rating inputs, sign-off timelines, the AI panel and empty states — with readable contrast and states shown by label and icon, not colour alone.
What changed for HR teams
+15%
Task completion after research exposed critical navigation failures and the information architecture was rebuilt.
Source: task tracking, Biz4GroupOne-way3-level (from One-way to 3-level)
Performance reviews now run employee → manager → HR, with history and a full sign-off log.
Source: shipped productChasingTracked (from Chasing to Tracked)
Review completion and sign-offs are visible on a dashboard instead of followed up by hand.
Source: shipped productMemoryData (from Memory to Data)
Top performers and top managers are recognised from a year of review data, not from who was most visible.
Source: shipped productScatteredOne place (from Scattered to One place)
Hiring, onboarding, records, documents and reviews live in one product for HR, managers and employees.
Source: shipped productBriefLA Times (from Brief to LA Times)
Live with US small businesses and featured by the Los Angeles Times in May 2025.
Source: Los Angeles Times, 1 May 2025What DrHR taught me
Sketch more than one answer
None of my three review concepts was right on its own. Putting them side by side is what showed the real solution.
Cutting is a design decision
The ideas I dropped — peer reviews for HR, email reports, timelines — made the product better by not being in it.
Design for every level
A system that reviews employees but not managers isn’t fair, and people notice. Fairness has to be built into the structure.
AI earns trust by asking
The more control people had over AI drafts, the more they were willing to use them.
See it live
Explore DrHR for yourself.
DrHR is live for US small businesses — see the product as it is today.
Built for the people side.
Not the paperwork.
DrHR is live and helping small businesses run HR without an HR department, and it was featured by the Los Angeles Times (opens in a new tab) in May 2025. Next, I’d bring the same three-level thinking to goals and one-to-ones, so reviews become a conversation that runs all year.