Our New Look: The Enhanced Workday User Experience

Personalization, simplification, and accessibility are more important than ever. And, as our application footprint and functionality continues to grow, we want to make sure that getting things done in Workday remains intuitive. Learn how users will have an even better Workday experience with Workday 29.

Workday 29 is out with a fresh new look. Why? Because our customers told us that personalization, simplification, and accessibility are more important than ever. And, as our application footprint and functionality continues to grow, we want to make sure that getting things done in Workday remains intuitive. A large part of that is making sure our mobile and web experiences mirror each other—so that you can start a Workday task at the office and finish it on your phone on the train home without missing a beat. Let’s run through how users will have an even better Workday experience with Workday 29.

Personalization

One of the key items of a more personal Workday revolves around the customer’s brand. Our customers told us that branding was very important to them, so we wanted to make it more prominent throughout.

Customers can already put beautiful, full-size corporate images directly on the home page, and with our updated design, brand themes will follow a user throughout Workday more consistently.

We did this because our customers, regardless of size, are rightfully proud of their brands. After all, Workday is the application where people go to plan and execute their next great business idea, promote and reward their best and brightest, and inspire others to do their best work. We’re happy that our customer’s DNA will shine brighter than ever throughout their Workday experience.

And, in a future personalization improvement, users will see their most recently visited Workday pages within their home screen. Rather than having to “favorite” pages within Workday, users will get an intelligent, dynamically generated list of shortcuts they’ll find truly useful.

Simplification

With Workday 29, we streamlined our design to help users stay focused on content. We rebuilt the information architecture within our pages to improve text sizes and weights to give users a better sense of where they are in all of our Workday tasks. Titles are big and bold so that people are continuously grounded in the menu hierarchy.

We’ve also introduced a simplified color scheme that allows the data to speak more clearly and allows for a helpful new design element to take center stage: the card interface. Cards allow us to group items—similar to how our favorite mobile notifications work—to give users right-time, right-place information. Instead of having to navigate into different areas of Workday, users can see at a glance the latest announcements and inbox items that need attention. And, having all of the Workday application shortcuts on one card also saves users from having to constantly navigate through the experience.

Accessibility

The new UI is more accessible than ever before, designed to provide a great Workday experience for everyone. In the past, we offered a separate web experience for our users with accessibility needs via a separate HTML-A accessibility site. With Workday 29, we have embraced Section 508 compliance standards across our applications within a single, unified web experience. To make visual navigation easier, we have strengthened the contrast between background and text. We’ve also improved keyboard navigation shortcuts throughout.

We’re Just Getting Started

With opening our Workday Cloud Platform, we now provide the tools to create new Workday user experiences and functionality. Because of this, our UI in Workday 29 is also a reimagination of how our core usability principles will be intertwined with our cloud platform.

One of our founding ideas is that enterprise software should be more like the best consumer software—personal, simple, and accessible. We hope you enjoy our new features, and invite customers to learn more about the Workday 29 improvements by logging into Workday Community to read our Workday 29 User Experience Readiness Guide.

More Reading