Frank Rodriguez
© Frank Rodriguez 2007-2026

Workday

Partner Center

— PLATFORM

Desktop


— DISCIPLINES

UX Research

Product Design

Prototype

Product Strategy


— TOOLS

Figma

Miro


— TECH

Salesforce

Workday, Inc.

A cloud-based vendor of financial management, human capital management, and student information system software.


The Workday Partner Center

Launched in November 2023, The Partner Center is a product within the Workday ecosystem that manages partner relations and engagements.


Post-Launch Results

  • • $34M+ in Open Pipeline Revenue
  • • 260+ Partners Enrolled in New Programs
  • • 550+ Leads Generated

• 4,000+ Average Daily Partner Users

Role

  • UI/UX Design Lead (One of 4)
  • User Research: In-depth research to inform design decisions and ensure user alignment.
  • User Flows & Wireframes: Designed clear, intuitive navigation for seamless partner engagement.
  • End-to-End/Feature Prototyping: Interactive prototypes for concept validation and iterative design.
  • Design System & UX Workflows: Established scalable, consistent design standards.
  • Visual Specs: Delivered pixel-perfect specs for development to maintain design integrity.


KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Planning: Early steps within the design process, such as planning, discovery, and workshop facilitation, are critical to executing product quality on a massive scale within reasonable timeline objectives.
  • Strategy: A deep understanding of the surrounding product strategies is vital for developing a long-term product strategy related to the entire suite.

Relations: Close collaboration among developers, design systems team, and leadership is essential to strike the optimum balance of quality and time to market based on business objectives and user research.

USER-FOCUSED PROCESS

With our users as the centerpiece, every UX initiative begins with a framework that targets and addresses the user problem to guide strategy and design solutions.

USER JOURNEY

User interviews were conducted to identify tasks, goals, motivations/intentions, and emerging problem statements. From those conversations, a user journey became concentrated.

TASK PRIORITIES

How can we make sense of a messy process with a mosaic of objectives, considering the various tasks involved within each partner type? By taking inventory of the existing functions within the platform and pairing them with the conversations in the user research sessions, we identified the intention/goal of the task(s) they were set to accomplish while understanding the information sought.


USER FLOWS

User types generated user flows for each significant feature track (Sales, Innovation, and Services). These align the working teams on deep dives into business requirements related to their respective feature functionalities.

CONCEPTS

When considering various strategic design solutions, it was necessary to understand the long-term vision of the product. Several products had been merged in response to the user’s input for a more integrated preference. During the progression of the concepts, we considered a long-term outcome that could be its entity or be integrated into the more outstanding all-encompassing platform. 


Key events that went into the concept phase were:

• Produce multiple options

  • • Conduct user testing research sessions
  • • Lead and facilitate design team peer reviews and critiques
  • • Review with Workday’s Design Systems team for additional guidance on ADA, globalization, content design, interaction, etc. 
  • • Collaborate with product and engineering teams to…
  • • Present findings and concept proposals to product leaders and stakeholders

PRODUCT STRATEGY

In a pivotal moment in which our design team helped leadership make a strategic decision based on the current suite of products being integrated into a centralized experience within the Workday Community platform or to have the Partner Center stand as its own, our team sought information from the potentially impacted design and product teams. We presented the realities and possible outcomes. Leadership concluded that the best path forward was to allow these newly released experiences to mature and measure each. It would be later determined if a unified experience is desired from our users through collaborative research findings further down the respective roadmaps. 

Potential outcomes were diagrammed to provide leadership with relevant information.

RESEARCH & FINDINGS

While the research goal is generally the same: to pursue actionable data, the methods used depend on the phase of the design process. 


When we considered various strategic design solutions for this ambitious experience transformation, we needed to understand the business objectives and how they can align with the users' needs and the long-term vision of the product.


During usability testing for the low—and high-fidelity exploratory phases, several options were shown to deduce the optimal user experience. 

For this phase, participants mentioned their preferred method of receiving the most relevant information, such as the kind of data that is important to them and how they would like to navigate through it, thus informing us of our strategy for interaction. 

PEER REVIEWS

At each phase, our design team and Workday Design Systems clinicians continually review designs to ensure that every element in the proposals meets the standards for accessibility, globalization, content design, interaction, visual design, and branding.

MEASURE WITH PROTOTYPES

In the initial concept stages, prototypes were created using low-fidelity. Prototypes not only serve as a way to measure proposed interfaces in usability testing but also communicate the expected experiences across departments such as Dev, QA, and Product Owners. In the latter phases of the design process, they were equipped with branded-style components from the Workday Design Library.

DESIGN SYSTEMS

Maintaining a library for the Partner Center was essential for continuity in the experience as multiple designers focused on their respective workstreams. Weekly touchpoints with our designers were coordinated to account for the UI components leveraged in all proposed solutions and as a way for the Workday Design Systems team to track the output of user-facing interfaces.

DESIGN WORKFLOWS

To maintain a rich library of design components for the Partner Center platform, the team created a workflow to support and meet the team's and organization's design standards.

EXTENSIVE USABILITY TESTING

A comprehensive prototype was developed for ongoing end-to-end usability testing. The goal remains to continually gain additional insights efficiently and accurately post-launch to support the product strategy while optimizing usability for partner managers to maintain and track various business relations with Workday.

CAPABILITIES & FEATURES

With the newly launched Partner Center, ongoing initiatives to include features such as managing reports and pre-ordering course training credits were prioritized on the product roadmap.