Introduction

These principles define the baseline experience we aim to create for our customers at every touchpoint in their journey with Gusto. They set foundational expectations for how to design, build, and show care for our customers. We hold ourselves to these principles and expect the same of our partners building integrations with Gusto. They are important whether you are working at Gusto, or building third-party integrations or Embedded Payroll with us.

Our Experience Principles

No Product Dead Ends

Design and build end-to-end journeys that empower our customers to accomplish their most important tasks with the fewest possible steps, hurdles, or blockers. Our frontline teams are not a stop gap for confusing or incomplete product experiences.

Considerations

How can we best help customers complete their tasks?
Where are customers getting stuck or blocked from moving forward? How do we know?
Where are we leaning on CX to solve a problem that could be better solved within the product?
What comes before and after a specific workflow? Does the experience feel seamless from beginning to end?

Consider all touch points

Our customers experience Gusto across their full journey with us — from every product interaction to every contact they have with CX and Sales. Consider the service experience that needs to be in place to support our features and make sure our frontline teams have the resources, knowledge, workflows, and tools they need to exceed our customer’s expectations.

Considerations

Is CX aware and trained to support the new integration functionality?
Has the team responsible for customer education or documentation been looped in to write help documentation where necessary?
Do any changes need to be made to CX tools or workflows to better support customers?

Prevent errors and fail gracefully

Proactively design and build experiences that make it ridiculously hard for people to make mistakes in our product. When mistakes are unavoidable, build pathways that empower customers to resolve problems quickly and with confidence.

Considerations

How can we validate critical pieces of data, like tax ID numbers, and where possible, automate these checks?
What happens when people fail? Are we proactive and clear about what they need to do to resolve their problems?
What are the most common sources of error states? How might we mitigate them?

Accelerate customer work

Tell people what they need to know, where and when they need it, and let them take action in context wherever possible. Avoid secondary locations. Let people enter information once and propagate it everywhere. Invest in real and perceived performance — getting stuff done should feel fast.

Considerations

What might we simplify out of the experience?
Are we asking for information that we already have? What would it take to pull existing data into our experience?
How might we improve the real and perceived time it takes to complete a task or workflow?

Do the heavy lifting

When employers use Gusto, we aspire for them to feel like they're getting their own Head of People. At every touchpoint with every customer type, we're proactive about leveraging our scale, experience, data, and industry knowledge to help our customers exceed their wildest expectations. We give them advice, share insights and, whenever possible, we take work off their plate. We show up as experts, so our customers don't have to be.

Considerations

Where might we use our expertise to offer a more opinionated recommendation or path forward to a customer?
How might we use data or insights to proactively advise customers before something becomes a problem?
What are our opportunities to automate tasks so that we can do the work and let customers know when it’s ready for them to sign off?

Be delightfully human

We’re building a people-centered experience and need to make use of every opportunity to show up with high care and humanity. This means demonstrating emotional depth by responding appropriately in the delightful moments and also when things are hard. Our customers are real people, with a full range of feelings and experiences — meet them where they are.

Considerations

What are our customers likely to be feeling at each phase of a journey? How might we better respond to their context?
What are the unique, special moments for celebration and acknowledgement in the experience?
Where might we be more human, friendly, and personal? What are the opportunities to make hard concepts more accessible, relatable and less intimidating?
Where are we not meeting the bar on building inclusive, equitable experiences?

Minimum Viable Product

The model above by Jussi Pasanen suggests that “instead of building layer by layer, teams might focus on defining the minimum slice across each layer. Any MVP must have a set of features that gives customers: enough value, a reliability level that earns their trust, and a usability level that allows them not to think about your design and to sprinkle a bit of joy on top.”

How we achieve speed and quality in our MVPs

Considerations

Narrowing the audience: Gain clarity about who will get the most value from the MVP and what their core needs are. Everything else is not necessary for the MVP.
Focusing MVP feature development on requirements, not nice-to-haves: For example, a requirement of a refrigerator is that it keeps food cool. Customers may also want it to have an ice machine and be connected to a Smart Home system. In this scenario, temperature is table stakes for an MVP refrigerator. An ice machine and smart features may not be.
Leverage existing design systems: Build on common patterns that customers are familiar with to make the experience usable and familiar with minimal effort. Don’t reinvent the wheel without a compelling reason. Workbench is the design system for Gusto, and a helpful resource for understanding our customer-focused approach.