Client
Workday
Dates
2022 -> 2024
Role
Vision and Strategy
"This is the solution that Workday customers had been eagerly anticipating." - Josh Bersin
Role: Principal Product Designer
Team Members: Principal UX Researcher, VP of Engineering, Directors of Product Management, Technical Architects
TL;DR:
I led the design of a strategic vision and a scalable delivery plan that addressed critical business needs, enabled end users to perform frequent and complex actions with ease, and resonated with customers and analysts across sectors. By employing a rapid, unbranded, data-driven exploratory process, I translated high-level strategies into actionable plans and meticulously crafted design assets that empowered product teams to deliver impactful, AI-driven enhancements, significantly improving user engagement, findability, and task efficiency across the Workday platform.
In late 2022, the advent of advanced AI capabilities (a la ChatGPT) created an opportunity for Workday to reevaluate its product ecosystem, branding, and user experience. This realization led the C-suite and executive committee to form a cross-functional task force to define a vision for applying generative AI across the platform. I was chosen as the Principal UX Designer, partnering with Workday’s VP of Engineering and a Principal UX Researcher to shape the future of our product experience within this new AI context. We aimed to understand universal user challenges, design an adaptable and scalable solution that addressed these pain points, and implement a strategy that could be deployed across diverse industry use cases.
This opportunity underscored my role in setting scalable UX processes, aligning teams, and building design frameworks that could be implemented in enterprise and consumer sectors alike, including complex, real-time systems like manufacturing or healthcare.
Our research methodology involved unbranded value proposition and concept evaluation, allowing us to gauge genuine responses without brand bias. Over 45 participants—from VPs of product management to healthcare workers, front-line employees, and strategy consultants—engaged with our research prototypes, workflow diagrams, problem statements, value propositions, and more. While our written assets were basic text on screen, I specifically designed our prototypes to be high-fidelity and intuitive while remaining distinct from recognizable Workday interfaces. This approach forced us to be creative, balancing visual appeal, vision, and usability in a format believable enough to elicit authentic feedback on our concepts.
“I really like what you showed me, like, taking the data, giving me an analysis, but also, making the data more actionable for me.”
- VP of Finance, Research Participant
To ensure we grounded our work in genuine user needs, we initiated five parallel research studies aiming to identify early adopters and subsequently uncover primary pain points, workflows, and desired outcomes. By centering our approach on core user needs rather than hype (which the AI world was surrounded by), we would be able to validate and prioritize solutions that would be practical across various domains and user types, unbound by specific product or industry expectations.
Several examples of our research assets and iterations
Through this data-driven process, we continuously refined our solutions based on the feedback and insights we were collecting. By design, this method—combining cross-functional collaboration, rapid prototyping and iteration, and value proposition based concepting—is adaptable to any field where understanding real-world use cases is critical. For instance, in the online education sector, similar studies could reveal essential interactions that reduce cognitive overload for students and prioritize clear, efficient navigation and responses to course prompts.
Our iterative, user-centered approach, and ultimately the vision narratives and assets were were able to refine, resonated strongly with both internal and external stakeholders. This ultimately led to additional funding and the decision to showcase our work at Workday’s flagship event, Workday Rising. At Rising 2023, our AI-driven innovations were met with acclaim, with industry analyst Josh Bersin validating our approach and underscoring Workday’s commitment to transformative, scalable technology.
As we moved from vision to execution, we broke down our strategy into actionable segments, each targeting a specific user need. In our case, these were enhancing findability, automating task completion, and facilitating content creation. Again, this approach is universally applicable—whether simplifying data search and entry in enterprise systems or enabling real-time assistance in an automobile, where drivers need quick access to information or guidance to resolve issues on the spot. Throughout implementation, my responsibilities included:
Stakeholder Alignment and Vision Communication: I presented our strategy to stakeholders, explaining how each component addressed user needs common across sectors and how each component leveled up to one larger strategy.
Design Artifacts and Flow Creation: I developed design artifacts, component libraries, and detailed workflow diagrams that translated our strategy into tangible elements for product teams.
Mentoring and Cross-functional Collaboration: I mentored and coached designers on disperate development teams in executing the vision and aligned cross-functional collaborators to ensure coherent, consistent delivery.
These AI enhancements were ultimately incorporated into Workday’s homepage, information architecture, navigation, search, task completion, and internal design systems. Our early rollout demonstrated measurable improvements in user findability, task efficiency, and overall engagement where user focus and efficiency are paramount.
By May 2024, dozens of early adopters across industries were actively using our solutions. We continue to work closely with these users to assess the effectiveness of our approach and identify opportunities for ongoing improvement, underscoring the adaptability of our methods to new challenges.
The team produced a research-backed vision unveiled at Rising which excited our customers and analysts. The additional engineering experiments, done in support of the vision, will help inform our technical strategy and path for delivery going forward - incredible effort and great job.”
-Sayan Chakraborty, Workday Co-President
Several examples of our finalized assets
As Principal UX Designer, I played a key role in establishing a high-level vision and an adaptable, data-backed strategy that met user needs and aligned with business goals. By distilling our vision into actionable plans, I enabled teams across Workday’s ecosystem to deliver transformative, AI-powered solutions with broad applicability.
This case study reflects the power of a systematic, user-centered design process that’s adaptable to various industries. The same principles and methods used here could drive impact in, for example, automotive, healthcare, or consumer tech—any environment where streamlined, efficient, and user-friendly experiences are essential.
For a more detailed breakdown of this project, please reach out; I would be happy to share metrics, quotes, design iterations, and detailed findings.