5 year vision & strategy (2024 - 2028) for Canvas, Workday’s design system.
Workday provides cloud-based responsive and mobile software for human resources (HR) and financial professionals (FIN) to simplify workforce management tasks such as payroll, scheduling, employee onboarding, time tracking, learning, talent management, and performance evaluations. Workday has ~12,000 global clients and employs ~18,000 people worldwide.
Overview.
Summary.
Our 5 year vision for Workday’s design system (Canvas) centres on an evolution from a fully centralised design system to a hybrid design system model that strongly supports teams’ growing AI needs. The need for this shift to hybrid is to ensure that design system tools and services continue to keep pace and relevance with what developers and designers on Workday’s product teams need us to provide.
This 5 year vision and strategy for Canvas includes (i) the introduction of a federated contribution service model (ii) an improved central design system site with CMS capabilities for federated contributors and improved site information architecture (iii) consolidation of all design documentation to be maintained centrally (iv) increased design system POV and governance.
We’re doing this work to support internal Workday production teams to make design decision making better, faster and with less churn. So ultimately what gets released across Workday products will be more cohesive and intuitive experience for end users.
Project roles.
My role.
Project lead, design lead.
Responsible for leading discovery/definition of the 5 year vision & strategy.
I currently lead the design and engineering team who are implementing the central site re-design and the federated documentation strategy piece of that vision (2025).
Size of the project team.
- Project lead (me)
- 7 designers/developers
- 2 researchers
- 2 executive sponsors
Project duration.
Initial vision & strategy project, 9 months, 2024.
(subsequent project work-streams are ongoing)
Details.
Problems to solve.
AI solutions at a design system level. AI tools and applications are evolving so fast that prioritising design system tools and documentation which support and guide a cohesive approach to AI experiences across Workday products need to be our #1 priority.
Quality and consistency of design resources. Different standards and structures for documentation, assets and maintenance across repos lead to varied levels of quality, and increase the need for double-checking with human contacts before using, and thus creating further comms overhead on askers and askees.
Relevance of design system tools and documentation. what gets designed and released by the central design system is not always what’s timely and most needed by product teams. Product designers have closer access to research data on what customers are saying and what end users need. These needs are not always sought, or readily available when design system priorities and roadmaps are being determined.
Confidence and knowledge in applying design resources. Variety of quality standards and maintenance between repos lead to uncertainty for users that they have all the info they need to hand. This reduces confidence and siloes knowledge.
Maintenance and consistency. Knowing that what is available centrally is up to date and aligns with the current Workday design POV.
Key Objectives.
Increase product efficiency by reducing the number of places a user needs to go to access tooling documentation to implement design decisions.
Reduce current culture of over-reliance on slack reach outs and ad-hoc decision making through in-person design queries across product, platform and central design teams.
Scale a unified Workday design point-of-view by leveraging federated tools and documentation in a central CMS based location thereby increasing experience cohesion across products.
Increase user confidence in findability, breadth and quality of hybrid design resources.
Users we’re solving for.
Workday Designers. People within Workday design orgs with ‘designer’ in their role title and who need to access quality and relevant design repos every day in order to complete their project tasks successfully and on time.
Workday PMs, Engineers, all design decision makers. Anyone at Workday who needs to make design decisions as part of their role (PMs, Functional Architects, Developers, Brand, etc), when designer support for their product isn’t readily available.
Delivery Method.
Phase 1 : Understanding the problems we’re solving.
Research gathering, user interviews, stakeholder alignment workshops, project team knowledge sharing workshop activities.
Phase 2 : Defining key objectives and success metrics.
Defining JTBD (Jobs TO Be Done), user journey mapping, service blueprints, stakeholder and project team workshops.
Phase 3 : Executive green-lighting.
Presentations, alignment workshops, knowledge sharing sessions.
Phase 4 : Project planning.
Roadmapping, Gant charting, effort estimations, resource allocation, Jira Epics.
Phase 5 : Delivery and testing of MVP solutions.
Lo-fi solutions IA and UI solutions prototyped and tested with a sample cohort of users.
Solutions needing to be developed are storymapped, broken out into sprints.
MVP solutions are released.
Phase 6 : Communications and launch.
Communication strategy implemented for target users: Comms roadshows, interactive live sessions, brown-bag drop in learning sessions, written comms in user targeted slack channels and email lists.
Phase 7 : User testing and iteration.
Research feedback sought from a wide cohort of users through councils, forms and surveys. More detailed research gathered through user interviews. Findings synthesised and delivered to the project team for backlog and iteration.
Outcomes.
Measuring success.
With the introduction of the new Canvas site IA and federated contribution service strategy, federated contributions to the Canvas Design System from product app design teams have increased in the last 12 months by 52%.
There is a dedicated service section on the Canvas site to self-guide federated contributors in how to add their design system contributions.
Volume of hybrid design documentation offered on the Canvas site, written in collaboration with product app designers, has increased by 60% in the last 12 months.
Lessons learned.
Managing early alignment and achieving agreement between multiple project stakeholders makes things run smoothly.
A strong and comprehensive communication strategy that meets target users where they are is essential for awareness and to boost collaboration opportunities.
What to change going forward.
Ensure that project stakeholder groups have visibility into the strategy changes that are coming up and being rolled out.
Organise and facilitate more regular consultation and IQI sessions where design system users can give input on the 5 year vision direction and share any insights, questions or ideas they may have.