Workforce Planning

Workday's a new planning service for workforce plan

Project Type

Launch a new workflow and integration with other products

Duration

January, 2020 - May, 2021

Tools

Figma

Balsamiq

Omnigraffle

Zoom video recording

My Role

User interview

User journey mapping

Propose a new user flow

Low/high-fidelity mockups

Design system proposal

Post-launch user feedback

screenshot-enterprise-workforce-planning

OVERVIEW

Background

Workforce Planning product for the Workforce:

Workforce Planning product enables HR to collaborate effectively with finance and key business partners while allowing functional and business unit leaders to plan the way they need to.

Create Scenarios and Workforce Plans Across Diverse Business Units:

with Workday Adaptive Planning for the workforce, you can create scenarios and standardize workforce plans across complex and diverse business units. Manage a single strategic workforce model that distributes across your entire enterprise while also building specific business and revenue models for individual business units.

With driver-based, what-if scenarios of your workforce mix and timing, you can better align your people with your corporate plan through top-down or bottom up workforce planning processes, or both. And you get clear visibility into your workforce composition and cost with automated allocation rules. Drill deep into data across dimensions such as job level, department, job family, skills, projects, and locations. Break down FTE counts compared to contract workers. Then, with a single click, factor in key global and local business drivers and assumptions that can impact your workforce needs.

WD Planning tools use rates in Planning products

Problem

Currently customers have the ability to create Positions in HCM from the context of the plan. However, there are more modeling use-cases around managing the workforce that, once the plan is approved, are eventually also transacted into HCM. In today's product state, customers turn their workforce plan into a reality in HCM they typically export the workforce plan from Adaptive Planning (aka. WD Planning), manually identify what in the plan is an actual change, and then:

export the changes and send (via attached spreadsheet/file in an email) it to an HR Admin/Business Partner who then manually keys those changes in HCM through their respective tasks
export the changes and an HRIS (or any integration user/admin) who will manually transform the workforce plan data into various EIB's that are then loaded into HCM
custom integrations that will transform the workforce plan data into EIBs and send that data to HCM

The scope in 2020 is for Workforce Planning with a reasonably standardized Positions Sheet and integration between Workday HCM and Adaptive Planning.

Challenge

What is most effective way to communicate with other roles in the workflow

How to design better landing onto Workday HCM system and what happen when landing onto the HCM. What is most important tasks that all participants must complete during the task submission.

Project Process

In this project, I started with constructing a hypothesis to test especially for UI proposal and designing a user research to find the rationale of disconnected workflow within HCM and WD Planning system and investigated the existing user flow.

Understanding

Hypothesis

User interview/test

Evaluate futureplan

Design

Evaluate design

User test 2

Propose experience

Understand

RESEARCH/DISCOVER/EXPLORE

Explore User Workflow

Understanding major tasks and customer's main task flow

First of all, I explored current user's workflow and how they work with their business partners.

Basically users prefer to setup plan and design simultaneously in the same steps those cannot be separately performed shown in second flow in the image below.

Major Issues

One important problem to highlight is that all collaborators are having hard time to connect each other and make changes and send the updates to them continuesly.

Based on user interview finding, in today's product state, customers turn their workforce plan into a reality in HCM they typically export the workforce plan from Adaptive Planning (aka. WD Planning), manually identify what in the plan is an actual change, and then manually report those changes and updates to their business partners.

Analyze required tasks in Workforce Planning

Required tasks in Workforce Planning to execute and submit the plan

On Planning, planner sets up the tasks and gather requirements
To submit details on Planning, Filtering and fill out details are required
On Planning, HRBP organizes plans that have been changed or edited. Communicate with other roles to specify and conclude the plan and its required tasks
The plan and requirements sent to BP and hiring manager via Planning
The plan and requirements shown on Workday HCM
Enrichment step on HCM shown once submit the plan from Planning
Submit the plan on HCM by hiring manager and transaction to be approved and created.

Picture 1. Flow of 'Plan to execute from Planning' to 'enrich and submit on HCM'

Picture 2. System flow of Picture 1. Plan to execute

Reframe Design Questions

How to effectively communicate with all participants in UI to execute task?

In iterate process, how do they receive and send back and forth via system in two different apps?

Do HRBP conveniently have UI ability to edit and change and send finally to approvers and manager on Planning and HCM?

What I learned from user interview and user flow are the work process to submit their plan can be more consolidated and quick in one or two steps.

Picture 3. Highlight of 2021 launch: expedited flow

Analyze User Journey

Far-sighted product vision

User flow and collaboration on workforce planning

How to improve customer support from Amazon Pay

How to design better landing onto Amazon Pay

A to Z Guarantee and make sure customers have a great experience in customer support.

Improve customer support from Amazon Pay

Create clear and easy step to file a claim on customer's perspective
Restructure user flow from starting point to post-claim/connect with Amazon Pay

Picture 4. Task steps and collaboration areas

User interview/test

Ideation/sketch flow and UI

Picture 5. UI sketches on user journey

Picture 6. Flow of 'Plan to execute from Planning' to 'enrich and submit on HCM'

Workforce planner task and its journey

HRBP task and its journey

Hiring manager task and its journey

System flow

Proposed 4 UI wireframes for user testing

I tested 4 different wireframes with users during the user interview session.

'Publish workforce action plan' task: This step shown on the 4 wireframes is a new step on HCM to edit and make final submission from a hiring manager. Currently it is not existing and manually sent to HR and HRBP to be ready hiring process.

Target market and problem (focused on the area_publish workforce action): Traditionally, HRBP, hiring manager, or anyone in an organization who is responsible for hiring activities (such as opening Positions, Job Requisitions, etc.) receive an email/spreadsheet with approved new headcount. This is because those users do not have direct access to the plan so a planner/plan admin has to dissect the plan and distribute it out to the appropriate organization hiring owners.

Goal of UX study: Goal of this study is to evaluate the proposed version_0.1 of 'create-a-job-requisition' and 'create-a-position user flow' and its new UI functionalities. The study will focus on end users (e.g. HR business partner) tasks on his or her workflow placed on Workforce Planning UI. In detail, We want to understand how the target user performs on proposed UI for the two different tasks: Create a job requisition and Create a position in the study. This user study will validate our design choices and its UI enhancement.

UX research objectives:

Gather user research participants' feedbacks/advise on the proposed UIs and prove usability on the proposed interactions.
Identify areas of strengths and areas of enhancement opportunity on user experience from a usability perspective.
Recommend top impact areas to address that would affect a new intuitive task flow on the two tasks.

This feature allows a user in Planning to publish planned new hire information from a specific model sheet to Workday so that downstream users can view, report, and begin the process of creating positions in the context of planning. This feature is expected to only be available for Workforce Planning customers.

User study methods:

6 participants are participated into two sessions in one hour long. We expect all participants are normal or corrected-to-normal vision capability. We will provide a user testing consent form. (consent form download)

Results: we invited 5 participants for this user test session and prior to this, we performed the Pilot test with 4 internal participants at Workday (see the Pilot study participants list). They are senior product designers and product managers who work on Workday solution products and its tools.

Metrics:

We perform the user testing on Zoom, virtual conference tool Zoom.com. All participants will participate in through the Zoom for both interview and user testing sessions. UX designer will gather participants' verbal feedback via Zoom audio transcript function. Feedback dictations are not necessary in this case.

Procedure:

Interview: general interview session will last about 15 minutes to understand participants' expectations on Workforce Planning tool.
Understand participants work flow: ask their daily workflow, tools that they use everyday and sharing method.
Performance Observation: during this session,
1. First, participants will be encouraged to play around with 4 distinctive different UIs
2. Second, participants take around functions (the functions are embedded in the four UI variations) and try figure out how to accomplish their two tasks (edit/change data and submit) on the four proposed UI.
Once ready, the users will be assigned a set of tasks to complete. If needed, a verbal guideline will be allowed to guide the participant and make sure that they can complete their tasks in the UI.
Ask participants about the proposed interactions and their experience to complete their tasks.

Data and study analysis:

This study will hold two sessions during one hour user testing and interview with participants (approximately 5-10 participants internally). First session will run with users to understand their everyday tasks/tools they use currently and their expectation on the product and needs on functionality. Second session will be held to understand how users accomplish their tasks using a new feature. Video record will be prepared and analyzed with qualitative research method.

Both two sessions will be performed via zoom. For each task, participants will be either shown static (or interactive) mockups or asked to interact with a prototype. Users will answer questions contextual to each task which will help us understand their needs and preferences. To measure the performance success or failure, experiment data will be analyzed in terms of response time (RT) and correct response rate (CRR) if needed. ←this analysis method is not used in this research as we will open another session to measure success/failure once our prototyping is ready. Two sets of data were excluded from the high error rate, and uncorrected data was discarded. Additionally, after the testing session, we will ask the preference rate using rating-base measurement tool using likert scale (refer the link - what's likert-scale and how to be measured below) for features and four UI designs (e.g. Workday one to five star scores).

Picture 6. Flow of 'Plan to execute from Planning' to 'enrich and submit on HCM'

Option 4.

Option 4.

60% of users satisfied in design option 4.
60% of users think option 1 is relevant and helpful for their job

How satisfied were you with the option 4. in terms of:

Screen Shot 2020-10-27 at 6.39.03 PM.png

RESEARCH/DISCOVER/EXPLORE

Explore User Workflow

Understanding major tasks and customer's main task flow

First of all, I explored current user's workflow and how they work with their business partners.

Basically users prefer to setup plan and design simultaneously in the same steps those cannot be separately performed shown in second flow in the image below.

Major Issues

One important problem to highlight is that all collaborators are having hard time to connect each other and make changes and send the updates to them continuesly.

Analyze required tasks in Workforce Planning

Required tasks in Workforce Planning to execute and submit the plan

On Planning, planner sets up the tasks and gather requirements
To submit details on Planning, Filtering and fill out details are required
On Planning, HRBP organizes plans that have been changed or edited. Communicate with other roles to specify and conclude the plan and its required tasks
The plan and requirements sent to BP and hiring manager via Planning
The plan and requirements shown on Workday HCM
Enrichment step on HCM shown once submit the plan from Planning
Submit the plan on HCM by hiring manager and transaction to be approved and created.

Picture 1. Flow of 'Plan to execute from Planning' to 'enrich and submit on HCM'

Picture 2. System flow of Picture 1. Plan to execute

Reframe Design Questions

How to effectively communicate with all participants in UI to execute task?

In iterate process, how do they receive and send back and forth via system in two different apps?

Do HRBP conveniently have UI ability to edit and change and send finally to approvers and manager on Planning and HCM?

What I learned from user interview and user flow are the work process to submit their plan can be more consolidated and quick in one or two steps.

Picture 3. Highlight of 2021 launch: expedited flow

Analyze User Journey

Far-sighted product vision

From user interview and exploration, I found user's journey starting from setup the organization, domain, add participants etc. Also rack of task and system is shown on the user journey. It could be user's pain points and I setup how to make enhancement from that starting point.

User flow and collaboration on workforce planning

Picture 4. Task steps and collaboration areas

User interview/test

Ideation/sketch flow and UI

From user interview and exploration, I learned things need to be required or expected in their journey: filter, organize, enrich, and submit.

I designed each step's UI and its required functions. Basically three roles are involved in the main journey and task: workforce planner, HRBP, and hiring manager.

Picture 1. Flow of 'Plan to execute from Planning' to 'enrich and submit on HCM'

Workforce planner task and its journey

HRBP task and its journey

Hiring manager task and its journey

System flow

Picture 5. System flow and interaction with each role

Proposed 3 UI wireframes for user testing

I tested 3 different wireframes with users during the user interview session.

UX research objectives:

Gather user research participants' feedbacks/advise on the proposed UIs and prove usability on the proposed interactions.
Identify areas of strengths and areas of enhancement opportunity on user experience from a usability perspective.
Recommend top impact areas to address that would affect a new intuitive task flow on the two tasks.

User study methods:

Metrics:

Procedure:

Interview: general interview session will last about 15 minutes to understand participants' expectations on Workforce Planning tool.
Understand participants work flow: ask their daily workflow, tools that they use everyday and sharing method.
Performance Observation: during this session,
1. First, participants will be encouraged to play around with 4 distinctive different UIs
2. Second, participants take around functions (the functions are embedded in the four UI variations) and try figure out how to accomplish their two tasks (edit/change data and submit) on the four proposed UI.
Once ready, the users will be assigned a set of tasks to complete. If needed, a verbal guideline will be allowed to guide the participant and make sure that they can complete their tasks in the UI.
Ask participants about the proposed interactions and their experience to complete their tasks.

Data and study analysis:

Option 1.

80% of users satisfied on the option 3 design
However, 40% of users answered that the structure of UI and organization is not helpful and relevant (see two charts shown below)

How satisfied were you with the option 1. in terms of:

Option 2.

Overall, users think the archive feature helps to organize/manage their task items.
However, users want to understand how to use this feature/function

How satisfied were you with the option 2. in terms of:

Option 3.

60% of users satisfied in design option 4.
60% of users think option 1 is relevant and helpful for their job

How satisfied were you with the option 3. in terms of:

Tasks

Observation/

Findings

Top findings

HEADLINES

Overall feedback from three different UI designs

Most users rate new designs as an improvement over current experience as compared to current tool such as an excel sheet.
- Most preferred UI is Option 3 in perspective of usability
- Option 1 in perspective of enhanced visual design/organization

Most users describe the new visual style in Option 1 and 3 are clean, intuitive, familiar and simple.
- Option 3. is same as an excel sheet users are currently using most of time but a bit clean. Easy to find contents and details as there is much spacing in the field.

Users liked the intuitive ways to insert their data at a time on the review page.
Users generally liked simplified toolbar. Filtering (called Control towel in the proposal) is useful and required to accomplish their task in easy way.
Users generally liked more information on the review page. An Indicator and UI feedback are useful to understand the status of their input.
Most users wanted some ability to group and save (defined folders as default, it is called 'Archive' in the prototyped UI).
Most users require mainly three things on their tasks, filtering, sorting options as they need to filter out of tons of list and see at a time.

DESIGN EXPERIENCE

Flow Restructuring

Final user flow on plan to execute

Picture 6. UI sketches on user journey

The problem I found from user interview and exploration, I learned things need to be required or expected in their journey: filter, organize, enrich, and submit.

I designed each step's UI and its required functions. Basically three roles are involved in the main journey and task: workforce planner, HRBP, and hiring manager.

Based on the user study, 'Tabs with divided two steps' is most affordable UI on Submission page. I discussed with Product managers and dev team that if there is any system difficulty and business oriented plan/issue on the final UI solution. We ended up with a solution that contains tabs and modern/clean UI on spreadsheet feature for future standpoint.