Our Ireland team shipped a quick-fix design for the recruitment use case right before I started. Recruiters were an edge case because they went through dozens applications a day. They wanted something lighter because the full page conclusion required them to click Done every time, which they felt was tedious.

My job was to work backwards from this specific use case and broaden their design to fit the requirements of multiple use cases.

Unfortunately, data science confirmed that analytics was not set up in the conclusion page because of limitations in Workday's tech stack.

I surveyed designers and PMs, asking how their users interacted with the conclusion page. It consisted of open ended questions like: How do you see the current conclusion page being used?

I interviewed designers from different teams and walked through a handful of user flows using preset personas to understand how different users might feel.

My PM and I aligned on these principles for the initial designs:

• Bring the content closer together and emphasize the status in header
• Visually differentiate the conclusion page from the typical Workday page layout
• Show context on the next page in the flow when the user clicks 'Done'
• Test multiple interactions (toast notification, modal)

I brought the designs into office hours to get feedback from the creative directors:

• They liked the modal version the most because it gave context to the page that would appear after clicking “Done”
• Added a checkmark visual for the toast to increase visibility for accessibility users
• Moved the toast to the top center because pages had action buttons on the right

I recruited 15 users, 5 for each difficulty, and created a testing script. Each user ran through their task 3 times and were either shown the original, slim, or modal conclusion page at the end.

Findings for original design:

• First time users thought this was an error page
• Users look at the center (Details and Process) first, not the header on the left hand side
• Majority of user preferred 'Details and Process' to be expanded at default.
• Users said that 'Details and Process' contained a lot of irrelevant information like case #, empty fields, etc

Findings for modal design:

• Users spent less time on this than on the original design
• Navigation friction- users expected the modal to pop up on current page in the flow instead of redirecting to a new page then appearing
• The person directly up next is usually the same person. Users doing medium/hard tasks wanted the entire approval chain
• Easy/medium users didn't click View Details. Users doing the hard task did

Findings for slim design:

• Every participant expanded the notification
• Users spent the least time on this design
• Users doing the hard task wanted a link to the confirmation details
• Users wanted the notification to stay until an action is taken (rather than time based)

The trade off with this approach is to sacrifice the comfort of a universal component for 2 components that fulfill the same need in one design system. This gives our designers the flexibility to create a more custom experiences but might be jarring to users because they won't know which conclusion design to expect.