Employee Time-Off Request Platform

Universal Creative managed employee time off through paper absence forms and a Microsoft Access application only departmental administrators could use. Employees tracked their own balances and had to ask an administrator for anything in the system. I joined as the Business Analyst to move the application to the web: I documented the existing system, interviewed administrators and HR, and defined requirements across California, Florida, China, Japan, and Singapore, including secure access outside the NBCUniversal network without a VPN.

Once the web application was built, a heuristic evaluation showed that meeting functional requirements hadn't made it usable, and my role shifted to UX design. I expanded UAT into usability testing and redesigned the experience around employees. The application launched at Universal Creative, and NBCUniversal Parks then asked to adopt it, where I led the implementation.

Universal Creative designs and delivers immersive attractions and experiences for Universal destinations around the world. Its multidisciplinary workforce includes architects, designers, engineers, project managers, financial analysts, legal teams, and other specialized disciplines.

At the time, managing employee time off relied heavily on manual processes and administrative support. The Microsoft Access application at the center of the process was available only to departmental administrative staff; employees were responsible for tracking their own available time and had no direct access to the information stored in the system.

When employees wanted to take time off, they completed an absence authorization form, obtained the required signature, and manually submitted it to their department administrator, who then entered the request into the Access application. If employees wanted to confirm their available balance, review a previous request, or ask a question about their time off, they had to contact their administrator, who retrieved the information on their behalf. View the current-state experience map ↗

The opportunity was therefore larger than converting a Microsoft Access application to the web. We needed to transform an administrator-dependent process into a secure, accessible, employee self-service experience.

Before defining the new system, I needed to understand the operational and technical ecosystem behind it. What initially appeared to be a straightforward time-off application became considerably more complex as I investigated how employee benefits were managed across Universal Creative. I started by conducting a competitive analysis, benchmarking against other time-off tracking applications to identify functionality gaps and usability opportunities (view the competitive analysis ↗). My research then focused on four interconnected areas: technical requirements, existing workflows and systems, HR requirements, and location-specific policies and regulations.

The research revealed that the new application couldn't simply replicate the existing Microsoft Access database without accounting for the broader environment around it. Current workflows, HR's future responsibilities, external-access requirements, and differences across employee locations all introduced requirements that needed to work together within a single application. My next challenge was turning those findings into a structure the business and development team could work from. I consolidated findings from administrator interviews, HR discussions, technical discovery, existing-system analysis, and regional research into a comprehensive set of requirements, organized around several areas.

The research also made it clear that there wasn't a single user of the application. These groups interacted with the same underlying information but had different goals, responsibilities, and levels of access. I translated the requirements into user stories so business and system requirements could be connected to specific user goals, then organized them into a user story map that connected individual requirements to the larger time-off process.

The initial direction for the project had largely been functional: take the capabilities of the Microsoft Access application and make them available through a web-based system while supporting the new business and technical requirements. Once the application was developed, I conducted a heuristic evaluation, scoring the application against 10 usability heuristics on a severity scale from 0 (none) to 4 (catastrophe). The evaluation exposed a fundamental gap. View the heuristic evaluation ↗

Making the legacy functionality available on the web did not automatically make it usable for employees.

The Access application had been designed for departmental administrators who understood its terminology, workflows, and business rules. The web application introduced an entirely different audience: employees who had never interacted directly with the underlying administrative system. This became the turning point in both the project and my role. The highest-severity violations:

• Benefits Summary table hard to read: didn't account for negotiated days, and the values didn't add up.
• Existing records couldn't be modified: approved requests couldn't be canceled.
• No system feedback on completion: a blank page was displayed when a request was submitted.
• Content and terminology issues: note messages were convoluted, date titles were inconsistent, and the Submit Request page was jumbled.
• Error messages weren't meaningful: errors weren't clear or actionable.
• No help or documentation: no Help, search, FAQ, or support information anywhere in the application, and Benefits Table calculations were never explained.

User Acceptance Testing was intended to confirm that the application met its business and functional requirements. I expanded the evaluation to also examine whether people could successfully understand and use the experience. I recruited three stakeholders and two employees and asked them to complete a series of representative tasks. Rather than evaluating only whether a task could technically be completed, I observed how participants navigated the application, where they hesitated or became confused, and which interactions required additional explanation. Participants also rated the difficulty of individual tasks. I made it clear that we were evaluating the application, not their abilities: if an interaction was difficult to understand or a task couldn't be completed, I treated that as a problem with the experience. View the UAT results ↗

Every task passed, but participants surfaced real friction

• No way to select a partial day when requesting time off
• Holidays weren't identifiable in the date picker
• Only requests that hadn't been approved could be canceled
• No visibility into who else on the team had already requested time off
• Supervisors wanted to approve requests directly from email and see pending requests on their dashboard
• No clear way to file a Jury Duty or Bereavement request

I combined the usability findings with issues identified during the heuristic evaluation and looked for recurring patterns. Several opportunities emerged: make a user guide accessible directly from the application, make page titles and terminology more descriptive, improve the readability of benefit information, surface upcoming requests on the dashboard, show remaining available time while creating a request, provide clear confirmation after submission, send confirmation emails when requests were submitted and approved, and add filtering to make request histories easier to navigate. Some findings could be addressed before launch; others were added to the product backlog and prioritized for subsequent releases.

Using findings from the heuristic evaluation and usability testing, I redesigned key parts of the application around the needs of employees rather than the structure of the legacy administrative system. The final prototype focused on making important information visible at the right moment, reducing reliance on administrators, and providing clearer feedback throughout the time-off request process.

At-a-glance time-off information

The dashboard brought time-off information and upcoming requests into a single view, giving employees immediate visibility into information that previously required personal tracking or assistance from an administrator.

Team visibility into time off

A calendar view gave supervisors and employees a shared, month-at-a-glance look at who was off and when. The supervisor view adds per-benefit summary cards and daily totals, while the employee view keeps team availability visible without exposing benefit-type detail. This addressed the same gap participants raised during UAT: no visibility into who else on the team had already requested time off.

Easier access to request history

Improved summaries and filtering made it easier for employees to locate and review previous and upcoming requests without administrative assistance.

Guidance at the point of need

Clearer page titles, improved information hierarchy, and accessible guidance helped make an administrative process understandable to employees who had never used the legacy application. I also created a user guide to support the transition to self-service, providing registration instructions and guidance for common workflows, made accessible directly from the application.

This project marked an important transition in my career, from business analysis to UX design. I began by approaching the application through business processes, system requirements, technical constraints, and organizational needs. Those skills were essential for understanding the complexity behind the product, but the heuristic evaluation exposed something the requirements alone couldn't answer.

A system can meet its functional requirements and still be difficult for people to use.

That realization changed how I approached the project. Usability testing gave me a way to move beyond assumptions and observe how employees actually experienced the application. From there, I began translating what I learned into design principles, interaction decisions, and product improvements. My background as a Business Analyst remained an important part of my design practice: understanding systems, business rules, technical constraints, and stakeholder needs allowed me to see the larger ecosystem surrounding the interface, while UX added another perspective, ensuring that the people using the system were represented in the decisions shaping it. The project taught me that moving a process to new technology is also a chance to reconsider the experience itself.