Reimagining the HR dashboard as an employee-first decision hub
About Plum
Plum is a health benefits platform that companies use to provide insurance and health benefits to their employees. For HR teams, the dashboard is their primary workspace. It's where employees are onboarded, coverage is managed, and benefits are handled as part of everyday work.
Team
Ashish (Product Manager), Jahnavi (UX Researcher), Aditya + Sooraj (Engineers)
Duration
4 months
Challenge
HR managers lacked a clear view of their organization. The dashboard was cluttered and benefit-centric, making it difficult to answer basic questions like how many employees were covered or the status of a single claim. For enterprises, slow load times and poor search made this even more painful, while critical tasks like enrollments or low balances were buried under banners. Instead of enabling self-service, the dashboard left HRs chasing Account Managers for answers.
How might we design an experience that helps HRs focus on critical, time-sensitive tasks while keeping deeper data accessible?
”Approach
As the sole designer on the project, I worked closely with our UX Researcher, grounding decisions in user interviews, support tickets, and conversations with Account Managers. The message was consistent: the old dashboard made HRs work too hard - searching across benefits, piecing information together, and often turning to AMs for answers.
My approach was to reimagine the dashboard around HRs' actual workflows: highlight what needed immediate attention, reduce friction in completing routine tasks, and ensure that deeper information was still available when required.
Old Dashboard
Solution
To solve this, I led a redesign that shifted the information architecture from a benefits-first to an employee-first model, giving HR managers a complete, 360° view of every employee in one place.
Dedicated page for critical tasks
The dashboard was rebuilt around a dedicated Home that acts as a true starting point for HRs. Instead of landing on scattered data and banners, HRs are immediately oriented toward what needs attention - through search, shortcuts, and a focused task list-so they can act without friction.
Organizational snapshot surfaced at a glance
Below the action layer, the Overview section brings together high-level signals about the organization - coverage, balances, and claims - without overwhelming detail. This gives HRs a quick sense of how their organization is doing, with the option to dive deeper only when needed.
Employee information unified in one place
The information architecture shifted from a benefits-first model to an employee-first one. HRs can now view an employee's insurance, dependents, and coverage status together - eliminating the need to jump across policies or tools to piece together answers.
Fast, flexible views for managing groups of employees
A dedicated Employees page was introduced to help HRs work with sets of people, not just one-off lookups. Filters make it easy to view states like pending enrollments, while performance improvements ensured the experience stayed fast even for large organizations.
Benefits made visible beyond policy documents
Benefits were moved out of PDFs and dropdowns into a clear, living view. HRs can now see active and inactive benefits at a glance, track coverage changes over time, and understand how benefits are performing without relying on static documents.
Providing clarity for planning ahead
Benefit detail pages surface critical numbers like CD balance, coverage status, and lives covered - giving HRs the context they need to plan ahead and avoid disruptions, without involving Account Managers.
Impact
Impact measured over the first quarter post-launch
- Early surfacing of blocked endorsements and low CD balances through “Things to do” enabled proactive intervention, contributing to fewer missed Day-0 coverage cases.
- Time to verify an employee's coverage dropped from minutes to under a minute, allowing HRs to act faster in critical situations.
Dashboard NPS increased from
36 → 51
Support tickets related to employee and benefits
-27%
Returning HRs
+14%