An All-New Employee Experience
Company: Workday
Timeline: 3 months
Date: March 2020 - May 2020
Industry: HR
Project Background
Help Workspace for HR teams took priority in development while the Employee Experience was left behind, resulting in customers buying a sub-par XO experience in their Help product suite. One of the pressing product questions that needed an answer was “do we go with a bespoke model of development, like the Help Workspace?”
My Role
I collaborated with another Snr. UXR and two Snr. UXD, as well as facilitating workshops / sprints with one scrum team (PM, UX, Dev). I was responsible for
leading the evaluating the baseline experience
usability testing
co-designing and facilitating a remote participatory design workshop
collaborating with adjacent teams to share insights
incorporating insights from other research studies to inform a cohesive employee experience
Research Overview
Research stepped in to highlight that this is not just a technical question we need to grapple with, but a far greater research question with hypotheses regarding what problem the experience needs to solve first and foremost:
Assumptions to test:
1) Employees want to interact with case solvers in more natural ways
2) We need to design for the emotional experience of the employee
3) An improved employee experience will impact on the case solver's experience
Evaluating the Current Experience
Usability Tesing
Collaborative research analysis
We worked together in the sudden pivot from onsite and in-person research activities to carry out remote team analysis and participatory design workshops with Design, PM and Dev.
The Three C’s exercise I created gave structure and specific analysis questions for team members to answer as the reviewed the raw data. This contributed to:
buy-in from cross-functional stakeholders into final research insights
diverse POVs on what the user pain points were and what might be causing those unmet needs
By mapping these mindsets onto the end‑to‑end journey, we were able to reveal richer insights about motivations, pain points, and the moments where guidance or reassurance mattered most.
Using ‘As-is’ & Mindsets to Envision the ‘To-be’
We then validated these insights in a remote workshop where participants stepped into these mindsets, walked through scenario-based prompts, and collaboratively rebuilt the journey. This ensured the final journey model reflected not just process steps, but the lived emotional experience of different types of employees.
Understanding User Mindsets
As-is vs
One challenge we encountered was that personas didn't cut it for the Employee, as this user type can vary greatly and experience many different scenarios throughout their repeated interactions with HR. As an alternative, we used 'mindsets' to help us design for the emotional Employee experience.
The employee mindsets helped us uncover deeper emotional and behavioural patterns across the journey by showing how factors like stress, available time, and confidence shaped the decisions employees made when seeking support.
Aha! Moments
What emerged from our research was this understanding of the range of 'low-touch / high-touch' engagement an employee needs from their HR 'Case Solver'. The research revealed that employees need different types of support depending on the complexity of their query and their emotional state—from fast, efficient answers for transactional issues to reassurance, trust, and human connection for more nuanced or stressful situations.
With this user-centred framework, the team was then empowered to generate new concepts and user flows to support these different communication needs and emotional scenarios.
Project Outcomes
Research showed that employees often felt anxious, rushed, or unsure which touchpoint to choose. This understanding of employee mindsets informed Workday Help’s all new employee experience, with:
Embedded guidance
Predictive search
Progressive disclosure of information
Clear, human-centred language
This shifts the experience from “submitting tickets” to getting support, reducing cognitive load during moments of stress—especially for employees in “distressed” or “sensitive self-carer” mindsets (as surfaced in the mindset framework).
The development of the Help Centre was an international multi-team effort Design and Development split between teams in the US and Ireland. Our ways of working was so successful it became modeled across Workday, becoming a driving force for working better together across seas.
