Scaling Workday’s Design System to 150+ Designers
Summary
My Role
Design Systems Lead
Roadmapping and Strategy
Component Design, UX Design
End-to-end Visual Design
Stakeholder Management
Design Mentor
Team
Amit Sharma, Director of UX
Anusha Bhaskarla, Design Intern
David Rogers, Accessibility Designer
Andy Echenique, UX Researcher
Chris Purssell, Eng PM
Duration
Kick-off June 2019, evolving everyday
Context
In 2018, Workday's design ecosystem consisted of fragmented component libraries scattered across multiple acquisitions with minimal governance. While Canvas Design System existed conceptually, it was still in its nascent stage with limited adoption and standardization.
I spearheaded the strategic vision to transform Canvas into a comprehensive, scalable design system focusing on three core phases:
Key issues identified:
- Inconsistent UI patterns causing redundant components and extended design-development cycles
- Absence of a governance framework for maintaining brand consistency and accessibility standards
- Critically low WCAG compliance (15%), creating significant accessibility gaps for enterprise customers
Three Core Phases
Stakeholder Alignment:
- Conducted cross-functional discovery workshops with product, engineering, and UX teams
- Established system metrics and design principles aligned with organizational goals
- Created a shared roadmap with prioritized components based on usage analytics
Implementation Strategy:
- Consolidated fragmented libraries across Workday.
- Leveraged core Workday patterns while introducing evolved visual language
- Implemented atomic design methodology for component architecture
- Established CI/CD pipeline for design-to-development handoff
Governance Framework:
- Instituted formal design system reviews into UX workflow
- Created documentation standards for implementation consistency
- Established contribution models for system expansion
- Implemented accessibility checkpoints at component level
Canvas, Figma
Goals
Business Goals
01 Eng Efficiency, Reduced Tech Debt
02 Faster Product Scalability
03 Leveraging Workday Libraries
User Goals
01 Consistent User Experience
02 Unified Look and Feel
03 Accessibility Compliance
Impact
Metrics 201854%
Customer Satisfaction
18
Number of disparate button styles
3
Dev Sprints to build a unique application page
15%
WCAG AA Accessibility Compliance
Metrics 2023
81%︎︎︎
Customer Satisfaction
3︎︎︎
Number of unique button styles
1︎︎︎
Dev Sprint to build the same application page
97%︎︎︎
WCAG AA
Accessibility Compliance
Key Sales Wins
Detailed Design Process
01 Discovery and User Research
I kickstarted the process by gathering information about the users, their needs, and the context in which the product is being used. After that, I evaluated the usability of existing design via heuristic evaluation to identify areas for improvement. This amounted to roughly ~200 pages.
Heuristic Evaluation
Alongside I collaborated with Andy (UX Researcher) to conduct customer interviews and email surveys to gather direct feedback and insights from users. We conducted ~50 interviews and received ~3000 survey responses.
User Quote: Chris M from Apple Inc
“ It is cumbersome to perform relatively simpler tasks like search in sheets. ”
02 Strategy and Building Consensus
To build consensus I facilitated a series of design thinking workshop to bring stakeholders with different perspectives, roles and backgrounds together. These workshops were designed to bring everyone together to share their ideas, concerns, and insights. During these meetings, we discussed and debated on different design options and came to a mutual agreement that a unique design system library will ensure cohesive look and feel across the product.
Key Stakeholders
Workday Leadership Team
Workday Leadership Team
Core Workday Design Team
Product Managers
Eng Teams
Strategy for Canvas
Canvas will be the foundational layer of Workday’s design system — defining the core primitives, components, and shared UX patterns that power our entire product ecosystem. Each product pillar builds on top of Canvas, adding their own layers of product-specific patterns, layouts, and flows. While pillars customize to fit their needs, the Canvas team ensures consistency and cohesion across all layers through system-wide oversight.
03 Roadmap and Prioritization
I
Tokens
Work with multiple stakeholders to consolidate and standardize all Tokens
II
Components
Identify components required for most use cases, design, iterate, implement, and socialize.
III
Layouts & Patterns
Introduce layout templates and patterns to solve repeating problems for efficiency and consistency
IV
Measure Impact
Collaborate with UXR to conduct interviews and surveys to measure business and user impact
We had limited resources available, needed to meet release deadlines, and had multiple crossfunctional dependencies for this project. We anticipated that this project may span multiple releases so we decided to prioritize. We implemented jobs to be done framework to identify unique personas and focus on one persona at a time. For the first release we decided to focus on the consumer persona since that meant the highest impact.
Consumer Persona
80% userbase
Financial Analyst
- Data Entry
- Consuming Outputs
- Approve Plans
Conductor Persona
10% userbase
Manager
- Facilitate Process
- Problem Solving
- Reporting
Creator Persona
7% userbase
Data Architect
- Data Modeling
- Application Design
- Define Consumer UI
Admin Persona
3% userbase
Chief Finance Officer
- Manage Personas
- Security
- Define Procedures
04 Define Primitives
Primary Color Palette
Dataviz Color Palette
Typography
![]()
05 Consolidate and Design Components
Designing each component was a small project in itself. Below is a typical process chart that was followed for each component design
Typical Process Chart
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Sneakpeek of some components
Toolbars (Before)
![]()
Toolbar Component (After)
![]()
Consolidated ~9 different toolbar size to 1 toolbar with two themes - Brand and Neutral. Redesigned each button type (12 total button types) in the toolbar as a separate component.
Breadcrumbs, Internationalization
Workday is used by customers across the world in 150 countries. Adding internationalization aspect in each component design was essential to ensure that the UI worked well in all languages.
Empty States - Introducing delight with animations![]()
We introduced fun illustrations and animations in empty states to make frustrating moments less so.
Canvas, Figma
06 Information Architecture
Tokens
Colors and Type were not owned by me
Components
Layouts, Adaptive Planning Pillar
07 Component Usage in Product![]()
![]()
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08 Layouts and Responsiveness
09 User Feedback
Sarah L from Boeing
“On the whole, it is a jump forward in usability”
Kevin Z, WholeFoods
“I like how Workday’s experience feels more cohesive”
Varun A from Microsoft
“Much more clear and intuitive than before”
Chloe L from Kraft Heinz
“The visual look is significantly better”
Metrics 2023
81%︎︎︎
Customer Satisfaction
3︎︎︎
Number of unique button styles
1︎︎︎
Dev Sprint to build the same application page
97%︎︎︎
WCAG AA
Accessibility Compliance
10 Design Governance
As part of evolving the Canvas design system, I instituted formal design system reviews into the UX workflow to ensure quality and alignment across teams. I also established clear documentation standards to drive consistency in implementation and usability. To support scale and collaboration, I introduced contribution models that allowed product teams to expand the system thoughtfully. Additionally, I implemented accessibility checkpoints at the component level, making inclusive design a core part of our process .
