Enterprise Research · 2023–2024
Measuring the Workday transition before anyone felt it
I led the research on Apple's move from two legacy homegrown HR tools to Workday, launched company-wide in January 2024. I benchmarked the legacy tools against Workday, found where the new system tripped people up in testing, and ran a cross-team and vendor loop to fix those spots before go-live. The finding that reframed how partners read their metrics: subjective ratings routinely contradicted objective performance.
01 — ProblemFinding the failures before launch day
Apple was replacing two familiar homegrown tools, an employee self-service tool and a manager tool, with Workday. The new system was more capable, but the switch disrupts muscle memory.
Two things made the transition especially risky to get wrong:
The research question
Where does the switch to Workday make key tasks harder than the tools people already know, and can we fix those spots before launch?
02 — RoleUX lead and research strategist
I owned the measurement strategy across both phases, designed the benchmark, and delivered readouts to the People organization, change management, engineering, and eventually Workday's own design team. I directed the research contractor through execution and analysis and partnered with a UX producer on operations.
03 — ApproachMeasure the old world to test whether the new one was an actual improvement
Rather than wait to survey satisfaction after launch, I benchmarked the legacy experience as a yardstick, then measured Workday against it before go-live to find and fix the hot spots. Two phases, timed to the launch.
Comparative benchmark
40 moderated task participants · pre-launch
I measured the legacy experience against Workday on matched tasks, pairing objective task performance with subjective ratings. The distance between the two was the instrument. A high satisfaction number after go-live would have been easy, and wrong.
Global launch survey
543 employees · post go-live, across regions
Once Workday was live, I measured the transition in the wild across corporate and retail, deliberately reporting where reception split so the weak spots stayed in view. The Phase 1 findings became the frame for reading the live data.
04 — FindingsWhat the research revealed
Same sessions, same tasks: 82% felt it worked, 54% actually finished.
Participants repeatedly rated Workday favorably on tasks they had actually failed. A disconnected two-step flow re-routed people mid-process, so they thought they had finished when they had not.
A high sentiment score was no longer proof the task worked.
The worst failures clustered around infrequent, high-stakes manager tasks: annual compensation, promotions, job and salary changes, self-assessment. All tripped up by disconnected flows, misleading terminology, and view-only versus edit confusion.
These were systemic issues, the same patterns surfacing again and again, so one fix at the platform level could resolve many at once.
The rare, high-stakes corner is exactly where a migration can least afford to fail.
The sentiment surprise
Newer employees disliked Workday more than tenured ones did, the reverse of the usual change-fatigue assumption. Retail and corporate had to be treated as distinct use cases.
Phase 2: the transition measured after launch
Reception was genuinely split, so partners could not call the launch an unqualified win. Retail ran hardest against it, ~47.7% disagreed the transition went well and ~47.5% were dissatisfied with the Workday iOS experience, compounded by a two-factor-authentication friction point.
The problem shifted from awareness to help
Change-management comms reached nearly everyone, but training effectiveness sat far lower. People knew the change was coming; what they lacked was help that actually resolved the task. The Phase 1 failure patterns reappeared as lived friction: delegation bottlenecks, reporting that took two to three times longer, and localization gaps for non-US users.
05 — ImpactFindings that shipped as fixes
Early readouts and cross-team working sessions put fixes into the release before go-live:
I also met Workday's Chief of Design to push platform-level fixes, seeding a quarterly recurring sync with their design team. The program's metrics fed executive dashboards reviewed by the CIO and SVP of People.
From one-off to standing loop
A one-off benchmark became a standing remediation loop. By FY25 the platform carried fixes mapping directly onto the benchmark's findings: compensation grid improvements, findability changes, a redesigned Time Away UI, and a multi-release Experience Redesign.
06 — EvidenceSelected artifacts
A few working documents from the program. Excerpts only; product and tool names have been changed, and personal names and identifiers removed, for confidentiality.
07 — ReflectionMeasurement as a lever
The easy version, launch and report a satisfaction number, would have been high and wrong, because people rate broken flows as friendly. The harder, more useful version was to benchmark the old tools first, then measure Workday against them before launch, find the hot spots, and fix them before anyone hit them.
I would make the same methodological bet again: pairing objective task performance with subjective ratings. The gap between the two was the most persuasive thing I put in front of partners, because it turned "users seem happy" into "users are failing and do not realize it yet." The mixed Phase 2 numbers earned trust for the same reason, leadership could act on a program willing to report where the launch fell short.
Daniel Farooqi · Staff UX Researcher · Product and team names generalized for confidentiality.