A massive update to Workday's base interface built on understanding the needs of professional users.  

I helped Workday design an effective update to their forms based on an understanding the importance of information density and it's role in productivity, Workday was able to push an update that respected both their casual and hardcore user tyoes. 

Leadership proposed an updated to all of Workday's forms. Finance product leaders reject it.

Workday was proposing to move all forms from side aligned (labels on the left / right) to top aligned (labels on top). Product leaders in Finance were refusing to adopt the update. I was asked to figure out why and propose next steps. 

The proposed update would have reduced information density by a significant margin. 

I interviewed internal stakeholders, reviewed customer feedback, and uncovered the root(s) of the problem. 

It wasn’t clear to design leadership why the update stalled, but research revealed a common sticking point. 

The decrease in the amount of information amounted to a massive downgrade for users accustomed to working in information dense environments like Excel. Professional users spending hours a day in Workday were facing a decrease in productivity. 

By explaining the full context of what was happening, including stickier political issues, design leaders agreed to work with the finance product org to come to a solution.

In order to satisfy the needs of leadership to preserve the update, I led a taskforce to test other updates.  

UX leadership agreed to assemble a cross functional task force to look for ways to improve form completion productivity for enterprise users. 

• A designer from the design systems team
• 2 product managers
• 2 developers

Any successful update had to improve productivity more than the loss of information density would take away.

I organized a backlog of ideas and aligned the team around concepts we believed would provide the most benefits to users. 

Everyone in the task force contributed. We ranked the ideas according to feasibility, perceived improvement to the experience, and if there were any related product requests. 

We came up with ~5 concepts we a thought were winners. One concept, customizable forms, was broken out into their own project which we prototyped. 

This concept involved adding guidance to a complex form. Certain users preferred it. Others did not, as it made scanning a form more difficult when information was hidden. 

A concept we tested that involved a pinned header similar to what appears in a physical invoice. This concept peformed well, but hinged on the need for forms to be configurable. There was no way to predict exactly what information needed to be pinned. 

Our research revealed that high information density was the universal constant. 

High information density was the universal constant across financial professionals. After testing several concepts over rounds of qualitative and quantitative user testing we found was that no one interface update was as important as being able to see a lot of data at once. . 

I audited design systems and found growing support for our density.

At the same time Material Design 2.0 had just released support for varying information design. So had SalesForce Lightning. This confirmed what I suspected and bolstered our case for having a similar control.

Material Design 2.0 had introduced sensible controls for density, acknowledging that there was no "one size fits all".

I led the team to align on a proposal to make forms automatically adapt based on the amount of information on the page

Working with my colleague on the design systems team and product managers, we proposed a carefully crafted extension of the update that would preserve the essence of the original rejected update, while acknowledging finance and professional users as first class citizens. Out three pillars were

1. Forms that automatically switch column alignment based on 
2. A long update adoption period with support from design
3. The ability to override the update selectively
   

A page from our proposal deck. 

Project Outcomes

1. 96% of the Workday system updated.

2. Finance agrees to accept the update. 

3. The first major improvement for professional user types. 

Design, product, and development organizations signed off we are now on track to update 96% of the Workday system in one fell swoop (according to metrics) by early 2022.

Furthermore, the Finance product, development, and UX teams gained a seat at the table when it comes to design systems discussions. It firmly established that professional users who spend 6 hours a day of their lives in Workday need special consideration. Workday is now becoming aware that it needs to treats its growing base of professional users like first class citizens.