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Internship, Design System

Bespoke to System:
Building a Navigation Language

With its many deadends and dissimilar UI patterns, Workday is difficult to navigate through for both once-a-day users and for users who live and breathe the system.

I played with this thought when I joined Workday’s Design System (Canvas) team in Summer 2019. In my and the team’s discovery of a frustrating, reward-less navigation experience, we kickstarted the development of the “App Hub”, a UI pattern focused on organizing tasks and ways to champion the employee-user.

Because this pattern is in development, I can only talk about in private presentations. Please contact me for more information.

My 12-week internship at Workday unfolded right before a design system release. I primarily led vision efforts on rethinking Workday's navigation UX by designing a new global UI pattern ("app hub") and united operational efforts towards the buy-in of that pattern.

As a whole, my experience gave me a foundation for working within a design system that exists in practicality and functionality, but also encouraged the need to develop an identity and core values.

Designing systems is like designing fractals. Nothing is at a stand-still, and everything is constantly evolving. At Workday, it was just as important to develop partnerships across the organization than it was to design a joyful experience for users. Aligning efforts was the first step to building a great product.