I led the research on Apple’s move from two homegrown HR tools to a new HR platform, which launched company wide in January 2024. I benchmarked the old tools against the new one, and where the new system tripped people up in testing, I ran a loop across teams and with the vendor to fix those spots before launch. What changed how partners read their metrics was that people’s ratings routinely contradicted how they actually performed.
01 — The switch Swapping two homegrown tools for a vendor platform
Apple was moving off two homegrown HR tools, one that employees used themselves and one for managers, onto the new platform. The new system could do more, but the switch disrupted muscle memory.
It was Apple’s first major move from a homegrown tool to a third party platform. Migrations tend to show their problems after launch, when they cost the most to fix.
The research question
Where does the switch to the new platform make key tasks harder than the tools people already know, and can we fix those spots before launch?
02 — Role UX lead and research strategist
I set the strategy for both phases and designed the benchmark, then took the readouts to the People organization, change management, engineering, and eventually the vendor’s own design team. The research contractor ran the studies under my direction, a UX designer worked on the transition messaging, and I partnered with a UX producer on operations.
03 — Before launch Benchmark the old tools before judging the new one
They were the yardstick. I measured them, then measured the new platform against them, while there was still time to fix what we found.
Comparative benchmark
40 moderated task participants
Participants worked through matched tasks on both systems, and I paired their objective task performance with their own ratings. Because the tasks and measures were identical, the two sets of numbers compared directly.
Same sessions, same tasks: 82% felt it worked, 54% actually finished.
People gave good ratings to tasks they’d failed
It happened repeatedly. In one disconnected two step flow, people were sent somewhere else partway through and thought they’d finished when they hadn’t.
A high sentiment score was no longer proof the task worked.
The worst failures were in tasks people rarely do
They clustered around infrequent, high stakes manager tasks: annual compensation, transfers, job and salary updates, and bonuses. Disconnected flows, misleading terminology, and confusion between viewing and editing tripped up all of them.
The same patterns kept turning up, so these were systemic issues: one fix at the platform level could resolve many at once.
Failures clustered in the rare, high stakes corner.
Newer employees disliked it more than tenured ones
That’s the opposite of what you’d expect if this were just change fatigue. Retail and corporate also had to be treated as separate use cases.
Fixed in time for launch
Early readouts and working sessions across teams put these into the release:
04 — After launch The launch survey came back mixed
Global launch survey
543 employees across regions
Once the new platform was live, I surveyed employees in corporate and retail and read the results through what the benchmark had found.
Retail was least happy with it
Partners couldn’t call the launch an unqualified win. In retail, ~47.7% disagreed the transition went well and ~47.5% were dissatisfied with the new platform’s mobile experience. The two-factor step made it worse.
People knew it was coming, and still got stuck
Change management comms reached nearly everyone, but training effectiveness sat far lower. What people lacked was help that resolved the task.
The failure patterns from before launch came back in everyday use: delegation bottlenecks, reporting that took two to three times longer, and localization gaps for non-US users.
05 — Fixes Fixing the platform itself meant working with the vendor
I met the vendor’s Chief of Design to push for those fixes, and the meeting led to a quarterly sync with their design team. The program’s metrics also fed executive dashboards reviewed by the CIO and SVP of People at Apple.
What shipped
The vendor committed to specific fixes against the findings, and by FY25 the platform carried them: compensation grid improvements, findability changes, a redesigned Time Away UI, and an Experience Redesign spread over several releases. A single benchmark had become something the team kept running.
06 — Artifacts What I can share
Excerpts from the program’s working documents. Product and tool names have been changed, and personal names and identifiers removed, for confidentiality.
07 — Looking back Ratings on their own would have misled us
The obvious approach was to launch and report a satisfaction figure. It would have come back high and inaccurate.
I’d pair objective task performance with subjective ratings again. The gap between the two was the most persuasive thing I put in front of partners, because it turned “users seem happy” into “users are failing and don’t realize it yet.” I think the mixed numbers from after launch earned trust for much the same reason: leadership could act on a program that was willing to say where the launch fell short.
If I could go back, I’d try to get involved before the platform was chosen, and ask the bigger question: was buying it worth it, compared with investing in our own tools? A heuristic evaluation and a comparison with other HR platforms could have shown whether it was actually more usable than what we had. The People team made the call on the business case, without a UX evaluation to weigh alongside it, and getting in earlier is how I could have given them one.