Workday

Workday provides on-demand SaaS-based enterprise cloud applications for finance, HR, and planning. Offering financial management, human capital management, and analytics applications designed for the world’s largest companies educational institutions, government agencies, and more. Organizations ranging from medium-sized businesses to Fortune 50 enterprises use Workday.

Case Study 1: Forecasting & Labor Optimization

CHALLENGE

Industries such as retail, hospitality, and food services have fluctuating labor demands. Labor costs can increase quickly, having a negative impact on profitability and revenue goals. Managers need to maintain tight control of labor costs, eliminate needless overtime & waste, and maximize operational efficiency. In parallel, workers need more control over their schedules and want stability and opportunity.

MY ROLE

In late 2022, I worked with a small team of two designers including myself, two product managers, and several software engineers. I led research and design for labor optimization. Our goal was to build a labor optimization solution harnessing AI to work with Workay Scheduling that could predict & create schedules based on the labor demand needed.

PROCESS

I led the qualitative research by talking with our customers in our design partner groups. We sought to understand what data we needed to support and the complexities of workforce management in the various industries. We created a journey map to determine opportunities and competitive analysis, as well as look beyond our competition for inspiration. We learned customers needed a system to support compliance in multiple locations with varying labor laws and handle complex scheduling scenarios.

The project manager, engineers, and I worked closely to brainstorm and experiment with flows. After the initial brainstorming and sketching, we began to develop an understanding of how our tools would need to work together with an extensive number of worker preferences and business constraints from Workday HCM, Finance, and external customer systems. Together, with the designer in Scheduling, we designed initial concepts, and iterations and created prototypes to test with our customer group. Shifts needed to be scheduled in varying time increments when setting up labor demand and customers wanted to be notified of any shifts causing excess labor costs.

We came up with the idea to incorporate this information into the schedule score. After a schedule is created, a score is displayed showing the effectiveness of the schedule based on constraints such as:

• Worker availability

• Worker time off and leave

• Worker qualifications

• Worker hourly rates

• Organization and regulatory scheduling compliance rules

We created a new prototype to test with our customer group and socialize with stakeholders. High-resolution wireframes and a design system were built out. The engineers built out a suite of tools as well as an AI-powered labor optimization engine.

RESULTS

The product was successfully launched in July of 2023.

338% Increase in Annual Requiring Revenue

3% Attachment Rate

71K Shift Update Notifications

Case Study 2: INTEGRATED PLATFORM EXPERIENCE

Challenge

Customers have to sign into several platforms to learn, build, and adopt Workday solutions. The disjointed UI/UX between properties places a cognitive burden on users. The current structure is overwhelming and irrelevant to those supporting Workday solutions. With each platform siloed and multiple backend systems, there is a lack of shared capabilities.

Our goal was to create a unified & frictionless experience to support how Workday users learn about, build, and adopt Workday solutions. Through a single portal, users will manage their Workday notifications, profile, and preferences, engage with other Workday users, and experience personalized content - enabling users and equipping them with the right tools at the right time.

My Role

In 2021/2022 I worked with four designers, several PMs, stakeholders, and engineering to ideate, research, and design a role-based community experience.

• Led the UX for the community homepage, unified search & results, and multiple community templates.

• Designed initial concept ideation, iterations, and prototypes.

• Wrote and conducted user tests, A/B testing, and validation.

• Created high-fidelity wireframes, and built out the design system and documentation.

• Partnered with numerous stakeholders: Support, Engineering, Marketing, Customer Experience team, Community, Legal/PEC/SEC, and Business Technology.

Process

Prior to my starting at Workday, a researcher held interviews to define jobs to be done by role and the current pain points of having to sign in to various platforms. Using the research, we defined the site structure ensuring it mapped to our user’s mental model. Each designer was responsible for several areas of the site.

The current platforms used data from multiple property landscapes. We planned to move some of the data as well as use some of the existing systems. We needed to ensure the numerous API calls wouldn’t impact the performance. I designed a couple of mockups of the homepage to highlight the most important tasks and reviewed them with our engineering partners to ensure technical feasibility. Once we agreed on a technical direction, I presented it to our broader stakeholder group.

I built a couple of prototypes that included several areas of the new community experience and conducted usability interviews. Together, we made adjustments to the project scope, information architecture, and experience. I conducted several more rounds of usability testing before socializing a design direction. We presented the findings and final design to ensure buy-in. We created a design system, accessibility annotations, and design specs to use in conjunction with the new site.

Building Trust through Transparency

We used personas and our jobs-to-be-done framework throughout the project to lead with empathy and guide our design decisions and priorities. The new experience needed to support four customer user roles and an internal Workday support staff role. Given the difference in tasks for each role, I needed to balance the wants and needs of the customer as well as Workday’s goals.

During the usability sessions, I learned customers had expectations of what the new site should be like.

1. Quick access

2. Personalized content & resource suggestions

3. Content specific to their role

4. Support for self-resolution

5. Space to connect & learn from one another

The concepts tested well however there were concerns about information overload. Customers mentioned wanting to only see content relevant to them. We paired down the amount of general community information displayed and contemplated customization. Due to complexity, we weren’t able to offer customization but did add it to our backlog.

A fork in the road

During the last technical review, I learned there were issues with the API’s performance and we wouldn’t be able to show all of the desired data from the Customer Center.

We had two options: simplify the experience with minimal data or change the launch date to allow for added development time and API testing.

I worked with the engineers to understand what data we had access to and quickly put together a list of the risks along with a paired-down wireframe. We socialized the UX risks, recommendations, and wireframes with the product design and technology executives. We chose to display data crucial to the customer’s business and moved the non-crucial data to the future roadmap.

Results

We created a role-based experience in a single portal. Within the first week post-launch, we saw an increase of 6.5% unique visitors (32,283) to the site.

• Reduced cost-to-serve through self-service

• Increased case deflection through unassisted problem-solving experiences

• Reduced customer effort/cognitive load

• Increased customer satisfaction with non-product assets

• Unified analytics and customer measurements