Your Users Aren't Comparing Workday to Your Old System Anymore

There's a comparison institutions make after going live with Workday that sounds reasonable on the surface: "Well, this is still better than our old system." It's true, and it's also the wrong bar entirely. Your users aren't measuring their experience against the legacy software they left behind. They're measuring it against Amazon, and that's a very different standard to meet.

The Real Competition Is Everything Else

Amazon has trained all of us to expect something specific from digital tools: logical categories, predictable paths, and the same place every time. You don't open Amazon and wonder where to click. You just move. Workday offers search, an inbox, notifications, a menu, a sidebar, quick actions, hubs, and dashboards, which means it offers a lot of flexibility but not a lot of inherent clarity. Flexibility without intentional design doesn't feel empowering to most users. It feels like standing in a hallway with too many doors and no signs.

Why Too Many Paths in Workday Create Friction

One of the most important UX principles in a Workday environment is also one of the most counterintuitive: fewer navigation options tend to create a better experience than more. When there are five ways to reach the same task, users don't feel efficient, they hesitate, they second-guess their choices, and they start building their own workarounds or messaging colleagues to ask where something lives. That's the moment the system starts to feel heavy, not because it's broken, but because the design hasn't made a clear decision about how people should move through it.

What Intentional Design Actually Looks Like

The institutions that get this right make deliberate choices and stick to them. They standardize on a primary way to navigate rather than leaving every path available. They organize the experience around how different offices and roles actually work, not around the product terminology baked into the platform. They remove shortcuts that don't follow a clear logic, and they keep critical items where users consistently expect to find them. None of this requires additional software purchases, because Workday already has the functionality to support intuitive design. The work is in making the decisions.

Designing like it's 2005 and comparing your system to your last ERP will always feel like progress. Designing like it's 2026 and your users expect Amazon-level clarity will build something people actually trust. If you'd like to explore what that could look like at your institution, we'd love to connect.