Content Strategy & Information Architecture
Case Study
Workday
For Workday’s HR & Finance SaaS products, users have a hard time finding things. With hundreds of tasks to navigate and complete, there is no cohesive, unified method for finding things. Thus, a user wastes time looking and creates workarounds to find what they need. At the core of this problem, Workday lacks an underlining strategy and framework to inform how a user navigates and finds things at every stage of the journey with a cohesive “voice” connecting them with the right content at the right time; we call this missing piece the information layer. To solve this problem, a foundations team was formed to define a strategy, framework and governance for both short and long-term initiatives under this new wayfinding program.
Categories
Content Strategy
Information Architecture
UX Frameworks
UX Research
UX Design
Strategy & Approach
With the goal to improve finding “things” in Workday, we created a process to get us there.
Project Charter
To instantiate a new navigation model within the Workday experience is a large undertaking, so the first steps towards understanding the problem begins with a project charter which includes a statement of the business problems driving the need for this work, how the project will address the business problem, and what the expected outcomes of the project will be. Our approach is not simply providing navigation recommendations but a whole enterprise IA Framework for evaluating and interrogating taxonomy constructs, designing and testing new navigation models, streamlining, clarifying and de-duplicating objects and things within the enterprise system.
Assessments
After establishing a charter, we immediately began a 3 day workshop series, complete with Miro exercises for a broad group of Workday stakeholders across the workday ecosystem. These workshops included themes around Workday’s Business Drivers, Workday Things and Taxonomies, and Impediments and Constraints. Next, through an exhaustive inquires with stakeholders, files and systems explanations, we were able to begin a sorting and grouping of things using an airtable to document an updated, clarified subset of things. This included areas in Search ad Labels at task-level pages documented in a 64 page dense body of information.
High Level Roadmap
After assessing the many facets (charter, goals, assessments) of Enterprise IA, we created a high-level roadmap for guidance to improve the wayfinding capability of Workday by indicating essential workstreams and dependencies in Workday’s information layer.
User Research
As part of the roadmap exercise, we articulated a research plan required to inform a user-centered approach.
First, a card sorting exercise was completed that gave us high-level groupings at Level One and Level Two depths for our highest use areas. From this and other related research, we proposed a two model test approach: phase one using Workday’s existing navigation structure but within a new top-level categorization, and a phase two model depicting new L1 and L2 groupings/landing constructs. An interactive tree test with end users will help inform our phase two approach.
Taxonomy/Ontology Tooling Requirements
Based on the ongoing assessment and research requirements mentioned herein, and the complexity of Workday’s organizational and technical constructs, building out a high-level governance framework before these other work streams are closer to completion seemed both misplaced and less impactful. To that end, assessing the capabilities, availability and implementation of an Ontology Management System (OMS) replaced the priority for a high-level governance model. If an OMS capability can be established from the outset, then many of the governance aspects can be addressed and instantiated into the information and technical layers, providing efficiencies, consistencies and richer data relationships at scale (death to spreadsheet and life to a smarter, consolidated, scalable information layer). These assessment activities provided valuable insights to how/when we move forward to a realized OMS that governs the information layer and provides the constructs for a myriad of IA needs, e.g., navigation, search, AI/ML, knowledge graphs, etc.
UX Design
Two designers with separate explorations created draft visual concepts, but those concepts without a validated navigation model risk a mismatch between form and function. Thus, our plan calls for additional assessments and research (~hundreds of apps / ~ thousands of tasks) before making final visual design recommendations.
Retrospective
Projected 12% findability increases across common tasks using new navigation layout with card sorting grouping/label findings.
Our assessment summary recommended building an Ontology Management tool off Workday’s existing Object Model System but would require dedicated resources and road mapping that currently does not exist. This OMS capability–at rudimentary level–could be implemented in 4 to 8 months depending on resource commitments/availability. However, the longer Workday waits to build it out, the more tech debt is incurred, less efficiencies in product innovations and IA/content governance.
