Workday success plans - From Fragmented to Focused

As the dashboard moved to a new design system, the primary challenges were team misalignment, limited customer understanding, and uncertainty about where improvements would create real value.

* Workday Success Plans is a subscription-based service that helps organizations maximize the value of Workday

Role

  • Lead Designer

  • Discovery & Research

  • Sprint level adjustments with Dev Team

  • Content creation( with Business Team )

Activity

  • Led a cross-functional project kickoff and set a consistent weekly cadence, aligning stakeholders and identifying key SMEs

  • Conducted client interviews to find insight and validate final designs

  • Worked with stakeholders to translate research and UX goals into practical strategies and confident decisions

Impact

  • Expected ~$3M in incremental revenue through improved retention and engagement

  • Established an AI strategy along with a documented roadmap for future enhancements

  • Led a less UX-mature team, helping them make more informed, user-centered product decisions ( and revealed the value of talking directly to clients )

This case study covers most impactful changes - there are many additional enhancements that addressed feedback and overall design improvements ( If you’d like to learn more, I’d love to chat and tell you about them )

Before & After

 

Background

No clear owner. No direct client insight. Lots of assumptions.

Without a shared direction, clear product leadership, or regular customer input, the team struggled to make confident decisions.

This created an opportunity to bring structure to the team and focus the work on changes that would have real impact.

Turning Many Voices into One

I established a twice-weekly rhythm with key stakeholders to build shared product understanding and define how we’d address gaps.

I collaborated with the team in an initial workshop to gather insights from all stakeholders and align on goals and expectations.

I facilitated a kickoff workshop to align the team and uncover early insights and risks. As a new member of the project, this created a clear baseline for goals, ideas, and expectations across a team that had not been closely aligned.

 

ux and product strategy

 

Herding the Insights

I spoke with clients and organized feedback into clear themes

( I partnered with another UX teammate for this task )

  • Manage & Optimize

  • Metrics & Reporting

  • Ask-an-Expert

  • Year-End Reporting

  • Self-Service

  • Learning & Training

  • Roles & Permissions

 

Now, Next, Later framework

I framed options as Now, Next, Later, helping distinguish what to tackle immediately versus what could wait.

The most immediate, value adding needs were identified in the themes: Ask-an-Expert, Manage & Optimize, Metrics & Reporting, Year-End Reporting

 

Strategy Before Polish

I presented wireframes to highlight the UX strategy

I intentionally kept designs at the wireframe level to focus conversations on ideas and structure rather than visual design choices.

The proposed strategy centered around Summary cards, a New Tabs structure, and AI driven insights

 

Can I open a tab?

I created simple concepts of the IA and tab structure to align stakeholders & reduced the risk of surprise pivots later in the process.

The original design grouped Activity and Plan Info under one tab, but we split them into separate tabs to better meet user expectations and business goals.

  • Eventually Split Activity and Plan Info into separate tabs once it was clear this better matched user expectations and business goals

  • In follow-up research, clients responded positively to the new navigation and felt the content and functionality matched their expectations

  • I explored multiple concepts and landed on this approach for it’s extensibility and simplicity of execution - view more concepts here

 

Small Cards, Big Clarity

A significant value add are the insight cards revealing data points that help clients manage and optimize their WSP efforts.

Content for different card states.

 

Reality, Meet Constraints

News and Insights was intended to use AI to highlight underused features

When AI wasn’t ready for launch, we pivoted to News and Announcements to support custom updates created by the business team.

Last Call (or the final cut )

The final design simplifies into 4 tabs: Requests, Activity, Plan Details, and Metrics

Following client conversations, team discussions, and more than a few strong opinions, we landed on these final designs

Requests

Roughly 80% of WSP revolves around Ask-An-Expert requests, with five resetting each week.

In follow-up research, clients responded well to a simple insight card showing how many requests remained, often saying it mattered more than seeing completed requests.

They appreciated the extra visibility without the experience feeling heavy or cluttered.

Activities

We surface information about all activities not in the Request tab.

Client conversations showed a desire for more detailed activity data—such as who attended and when—with additional activity details planned on the roadmap.

Follow-up research confirmed interest in expanding this information further.

Plan Details

Adding more context and insights to Plan Details was well received, with clients saying the previous design didn’t provide enough information.

The News and Announcements section was also seen as useful, with clear feedback on the types of content clients wanted most.

Metrics

Clients saw the Metrics tab as a significant value add, especially for monitoring and reporting on engagement and activity.

How they used the data varied—some wanted reports, while others used it to manage their teams.

The strongest takeaway was a clear desire for more metrics across the product.

Select below for a more detailed view

We went back to clients for a final sanity check. Good news: the architecture held up, the tabs made sense, and the extra context made WSP easier to manage.

Take aways

  • The project started without specific researched enhancements, but we kicked off in August and, even with an additional asks, ran research, followed up with clients, and started building within six months

  • Organizing enhancements into Now / Next / Later, gave the team a clear roadmap for future improvements

  • Built rapport with clients, opening up a more consistent feedback loop for future improvements ( In follow up research, clients called out several meaningful insights to improve clarity and functionality)

  • Client conversations surfaced gaps in learning and education, easy to solve and high value to clients, giving the team a clear idea of what to tackle next