Sana Acquisition
Workday acquired Sana to create a more AI‑native, front door for work experience. Another designer and I were tasked to align Workday’s legacy UI with that vision.
Sana Experience Principles
Master the fundamentals
Use established standards and build trust through well- crafted details and consistent components.
Don’t make me think
Understand our users intent, make the end goal clear and the path there effortless.
Make experiences rewarding
Keep users motivated through rewarding and personal experiences.
Make bold bets where it counts
Find and leverage opportunities where innovation can change the way the world learns.
Workday Experience Principles
Empower
Humans staying in control, while the tool provides a balance of flexibility and power.
Trust
Always feeling informed, capable, and enthusiastic.
Grow
Enabled for constant change knowing the system remains adaptable and resilient.
What we heard from workmates
Workday is visually and structurally inconsistent across surfaces. Moving between areas doesn’t feel like moving within one product family.
Page hierarchy is often unclear: everything can feel interchangeable.
Configuration flexibility has unintentionally flattened meaning: What is primary vs secondary content? What should be persistent vs contextual? Where should the user’s attention go?
Our Direction
We’re building the visual and structural grammar that lets teams innovate without breaking coherence.
Uplift visual appeal and clarity across Workday.
Create coherence across page types.
Support different product flavors, while keeping one family identity.
Enable other teams to build on it.
Site Mapping
Site mapping allowed us to understand areas of focus. Workday has a lot of features to offer. We needed to have a starting point and use that to dictate the rest of the effort. The homepage became our first area of focus.
Page Hierarchy Change
One of the biggest things we wanted to address first is page hierarchy. We wanted to remove the feeling of endless scrolling in order for the user to find what they're in the page for. A clearer form of hierarchy allows important content to be at the top of the page and the scroll becomes related content.
Typography
The next thing we needed to tackle is type. With the help of Canvas (Workday's design system), our approach on this was to follow the Major Second scale.
The Major Second (1.125) scale is widely considered the "Goldilocks" of UI typography, especially for digital products and complex interfaces. While more dramatic scales (like the Golden Ratio) look beautiful on a poster, they often fail in a functional app environment.
Golden Rule of Vertical Rhythm: for a layout to feel grounded and professional, the height of every element’s "bounding box" must be a multiple of a consistent base unit.
- Define your Base Unit: Base unit = 8px grid. Base font unit is 24px (16 × 1.5).
- Align Headings: Even if a heading uses a different line-height (e.g., 1.2), its total height (line-height + margins) should equal a multiple of 24px.
- Standardise Margins: Use your base unit (24px) for the bottom margins of all block-level elements to keep the rhythm flowing down the page.
This scale follows a Hybrid Manual Scale optimized for Vertical Rhythm. Unlike traditional modular scales (such as the Golden Ratio or Major Third) that rely on a single fixed mathematical multiplier, this scale utilizes a Step-based approach tied to a specific base unit.
Page Components Spacing
Homepage v1 Direction - Before and After
The v1 concept allowed us to have a concrete design approach that will allow us to have a direction on components and visual style for other Workday pages.
Componentizing Our Approach
Once we solidified our homepage approach, we needed to make sure we componentize every page element in order for simplified implementation as well as create a consistent cohesion towards other pages. We gathered 20+ designers in their respective product spaces to collaboratively tackle a cohesive approach in expanding our core design vision.
Here are some examples of before and after designs of our vision coming to life.
The design surge was a success. We were able to create a cohesive component design system that applied the core principles from the design vision.
Big Picture Feedback
Overall Sentiment
The intention (modernized UI, better search, AI-enabled experience) is appreciated, but customers see the execution as confusing and risky for change management.
Feedback clusters into four main themes
Deployment/opt‑in strategy, UX and navigation regressions, branding and visual issues, and questions/concerns around Sana AI capabilities and licensing.
Direct Quotes:
“The new UI feels clunky. I’m curious as to what peer review or testing went into this… The background color changing didn’t add any value, but it does cause more work since now all our existing branding banners and logos have to be updated to match the new color.”
"This is backwards UX experience. Multiple clicks and additional scroll bars – especially in search results. Too much of screen real estate is used by blank spaces!"
"There is no benefit to moving the search bar lower on the home page, only to move it back up to the top on every subsequent page. Consistency in location is better."
“We just enabled this for testing. We can see the search box moved but the search results seem the same as before and there’s no noticeable difference. But in the description it talked about Blending Sana’s AI Capability – could someone give more information on what sort of impact change this is supposed to have?”
After Hearing the Concerns from Customer Feedback, We Pivoted
When we learned about the overall sentiment of customers, we decided to go back to the drawing board. This was a learning moment and we needed to shift our focus.
How can we improve the visual elements without compromising user experience?
How might we improve the roll-out strategy?
How might we integrate Sana with a clear visual direction that doesn't add confusion?
A New Goal for v2
For the next phase of the project, we wanted to make sure we were clear in where our intentions are focused.
Improve both visual treatment and user experience where we can.
Be transparent with customers and involve them in the iteration process so that it's not a surprise.
Make sure both Workday's Brand Identity and Sana's Design Principles are displayed cohesively in balance.
Some Notable Learnings From This Experience
Expectation management and change comms
Design modernization must be paired with explicit rollout narratives; otherwise even good UI shifts feel risky and erode trust.
Opt‑in / opt‑out and control
Give admins coarse and fine‑grained controls to phase in experience changes; decouple major elements (search, nav, branding) so adoption can match organizational readiness.
Don’t trade usability for aesthetics
Modern layouts should reduce cognitive load, not just visual noise; every visual change must be checked against navigation effort and learnability for existing heavy users.
Navigation and information architecture impact
Re‑platforming navigation requires role‑based IA and global configuration options; otherwise, everyday workflows become fragile and expensive to retrain.
AI signaling and capability clarity
AI UI should be transparent: signal only what’s truly available in a tenant, distinguish clearly between semantic search, agents, and summaries, and tie visual cues to real capability.
Training, documentation, and operational cost
Design decisions should account for the downstream cost of change; we need upgrade paths that minimize documentation churn and preserve familiarity where value is low.
