Shaping the Future of Workday Media: A Strategic, User-Centered Approach
How can we increase media usage across Workday by providing the right admin tools for authoring videos quickly? And equally important - how do we craft the right story to gain stakeholder buy-in?
Media is a video product that allows users to create and publish videos across different areas of Workday with the goal of providing engaging media experiences throughout a user’s journey in Workday and helping applications differentiate their offerings.
"In close collaboration with product, I developed the UX vision for a reimagined Workday Media, designed to improve the admin user’s ability to create and publish videos, expand its offerings to different application partners, and increase Media usage across Workday."
Problem Space
A seamless video authoring experience is crucial for Workday Media's success, driving adoption and contributing to app partner value and customer stickiness. However, the existing experience fell short. Administrators faced significant challenges: the video authoring workflow was complex and inefficient, and limited functionality hampered full video utilization.
These issues directly impacted business goals and hindered Workday's ability to offer a engaging and competitive media platform. A key contributing factor was the non-extensible design of the existing product, which would make it increasingly difficult to add new features and capabilities necessary for future growth.
Other gaps included:
UI/UX issues (low discoverability, confusing workflows)
Missing features (multi-language support, video editing)
Reliance on third-party tools
Outdated Media design featuring the interactions builder panel
Research
Throughout my work on Media, I conducted extensive user research, including usability testing, design partner groups (DPGs), and user interviews across different areas of the product. This broad exposure gave me a unique perspective on the challenges faced by admins and revealed recurring patterns across Media.
Synthesizing these insights with feedback from other product areas, I identified a critical, overarching problem: Workday Media's existing architecture lacked the scalability and extensibility needed to support future product growth and meet evolving user needs.
Synthesis sheet of results from user interviews exploring the interactions editor
Synthesis & Alignment
I led a workshop with the PMs on Media to consolidate the research and create a holistic view of the admin’s journey from creating to publishing and embedding a video into an app in Workday. The goal was to better understand the full journey and identify the opportunities that aligned with our strategic pillars. Furthermore, this was also to highlight the significant pain points of the existing UX and demonstrate the breaking point the product would reach while trying to grow.
We used the Moscow framework to prioritize the feature by must haves, should haves, could haves and won’t haves.
Some must haves and should haves included:
Decoupling interactions from videos
Improving the preview/save draft workflow
In-app editing for captions and transcriptions
Simple video editing solution
Automating caption translations
Synthesis sheet of results from user interviews exploring the interactions editor
Design & Iteration
With priorities in hand, I planned a 2-day workshop with the other designers and researchers in my org to ideate on different design solutions. I gave them context on the problem, we explored how other products solved similar problems and went through multiple exercises to explore different solutions. From there, we voted on the concepts we felt were the most compelling.
After the workshop I took the sketches and converted them into wireframes in Figma, ideating on them in varying degrees of fidelity up to high-fidelity mockups.
I led a 2-day mini design sprint to collaborate on coming up with different possible design solutions
Low-fidelity wireframes resulting from the sketches from the workshop
Two challenges in this design were coming up with an extensible version of Media that could support future growth and features that were yet unknown and using existing patterns and components that already existed in the design system or other products in Workday. It was important to strive for consistency and create experiences that were familiar to admins even when innovating.
The final designs included a tab navigation and contextual panel design that would allow for extensibility, flexibility, and streamlined workflows.
Simple split and trim video editor design as requested by users
The contextual panel for editing captions in different languages allowing for more robust multi-language support
The Interactions panel view with the list of interactions and a pop-out of the Add Interactions panel
Stakeholder Alignment
The biggest challenge we faced was getting buy-in from stakeholders. My PM partner and I pitched this project to the PM director in our org during a time where emphasis on business value was intensifying due to concerns about a recession. This project was large in nature and consisted of multiple use cases. Given this context, the PM director wanted us to evolve our pitch and make a strong connection to a single, critical use case.
Through using the RICE framework, we narrowed down our leading use case to multi-language support for a global user base. Once we led our pitch with this use case, we got the seal of approval from the PM director with the caveat that we start with an MVP version focusing on multi-language support.