Workday’s Design Pattern Library: a 0-1 product initiative.
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.
We identified the need for a Workday wide design pattern library that would be a trusted and verified resource for production teams who need to build new or modified patterns for their releases.
Lack of awareness between product teams of existing patterns that are already in production and have been built, tested and researched by other Workday product apps is responsible for much duplication of effort, production cycle churn and lack of experience cohesion for users. We hypothesised that if we could document all existing pattern examples in one centralised location then this could be a verified source of truth for teams. However, this would required mass adoption from Workday’s product orgs along with leadership advocacy for mandatory pattern contribution drives to keep the library content relevant and up to date.
We’re doing this work to support internal Workday production teams to make design decision making better, faster and with less churn. So ultimately patterns which get released across Workday products will be more cohesive and intuitive experience for end users.
Project roles
My role.
Product co-founder, project lead, design lead.
I currently lead the project team who continue to deliver releases of the Workday Pattern Library (2025).
Size of the project team.
- Project lead (me)
- 4 designers
- 7 developers
- 2 researchers
- 1 executive sponsor
Initial project duration.
12 months, 2023-2024.
(subsequent strategic work-streams are ongoing)
Details.
Key Objectives.
Increase product efficiency by reducing duplication and churn during production cycles.
Scale a unified Workday design point-of-view by re-using existing documented and approved patterns thereby increasing experience cohesion across products.
Increase user confidence in findability, breadth and quality of existing pattern resources.
Reduce current culture of over-reliance on slack reach outs and in-person design queries across product, platform and central design teams.
Problems to solve.
Awareness of existing pattern examples and docs. So many design repos, housed and maintained across pillars and orgs. Finding existing patterns is challenging and discovery is typically spread via word of mouth or slack 1:many queries.
Quality and cohesion of patterns. Different standards and structures for patterns 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.
Maintenance and consistency. Knowing that what is available and being replicated is up to date and aligns with the current Workday design POV.
Users we’re solving for.
Workday PMs, Engineers, all design decision makers. Anyone at Workday who needs to find existing patterns 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.
Workday Designers. People within Workday design orgs with ‘designer’ in their role title and who need to have visibility of what’s already been designed every day in order to complete their project tasks successfully and on time.
Delivery Method.
Phase 1: Executive sponsorship.
Achieve executive sponsorship and resource allocation to deliver our start-up vision for a centralised Workday design pattern library.
Phase 2: Defining roles and permissions.
Define user roles, permissions and JTBD.
Create service blueprints and user journeys for end-user, front-stage user and admin library roles.
Phase 3: Creating library object models.
Pattern categorisation model and a service contribution model.
Stakeholder and project team workshops.
Phase 4 : Project planning.
Roadmapping, Gant charting, effort estimations, resource allocation, Jira Epics.
Phase 5 : Delivery and testing of MVP solutions.
Lo-fi and mid-fi design solutions prototyped and tested with a sample cohort of users.
Hi-fi solutions designed and iterated based on user testing feedback.
Solutions needing to be built are storymapped, broken out into sprints and QA tested.
MVP solution is released.
Phase 6 : Communications and launch.
Communication strategy implemented for target users: Solution roadshows, interactive live sessions, brown-bag drop in learning sessions, written comms in user targeted slack channels and email lists.
Phase 7 : Large scale contribution events.
Organised mass contribution events that require participation from all design teams during a fixed period of time, during which the team’s patterns are added to the library and then reviewed and published by library admin resources.
Phase 8 : User testing and iteration.
Research feedback sought from a wide cohort of users through forms and surveys. More detailed research gathered through user interviews. Findings synthesised and delivered to the project team for iteration.
Outcomes.
Outcomes so far.
During the mass contribution events, 100% of product design teams contributed 100% of pattern examples from their app (from the last 3 years of releases) onto the centralised pattern library.
90% of targeted library users say they find the pattern library a beneficial resource that reduced churn and uncertainty when making early discovery decisions.
Number of library site visits continues to scale upwards.
85% of product design teams regularly contribute updated and new pattern examples to the library.
Duplication of effort across teams building similar patterns has been reduced.
Lessons learned.
Providing regular opportunities for feedback and retros for participating teams during mandatory contribution drives reduces the risk of disengagement and frustration with additional workload.
A strong and comprehensive communication strategy that meets target users where they are is essential for awareness and to maintain contribution levels.
What to change going forward.
Plan mandatory contribution cycles in collaboration with design teams 6 months in advance to give managers time to schedule pattern library contribution work alongside other projects.
Continue to improve the CRUD functionality within the library site to make the processing of contributions more streamlined for front-stage users and admins.