Workday Rising 2023
Workday Rising is our annual customer event. This year’s Rising was our largest yet, at 15,000 attendees, hosted at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Alongside Aly Cunningham, I lead the design, and design strategy for the Innovation Hall (Expo), Engagement Zone (Braindate, Customer Network Center, and Ask-an-Expert), and Meeting Centers (Meetings On-Demand, Executive Meeting Center, and Partner Meeting Center).
Innovation Hall
The Innovation Hall is described as the “heartbeat” of Workday Rising. It is our “expo.” The place where we demo our products, advertise our solutions, host both fun, and strategic activations, demonstrate our innovation and AI capabilities, and much more.
A large part of the Innovation Hall is the “Workday Zones.” These are our product zones, where we deep dive into each buying center/industry, and how Workday’s products support those users and solve for their pain points. Workday Zones always has its own version of the brand, and its own design strategy. Aly and I created a system for demos, theaters, welcome desks, hanging banners- each and every element of the Workday Zones, to come together cohesively, and tell the best story,
This years’ zones were focused on the “Workday blue” which made a large visual impact, with everything inside the “Workday arch” (an orange rug on the floor to mimc the arch in our logo) being blue. Each zone also had it’s own accent gradient, to differentiate it from other zones, and to be used to provide a visual break from the blue. Our “Industries Zone” had it’s own demo structures, each of which was a building that was reflective of that industry. Outside of our zones we had a variety of “parks,” areas, activations, and photo ops, creating valuable attendee experiences outside of “learning.” These were the spaces where we stretched the brand to break the system, and be more fun.
At the heart of the Innovation Hall, was the “Core.” The Core had a suspended LED sphere, where we highlighted our values, partners, technology, and specifically AI and Machine Learning.
Engagement Zone
The Engagement Zone consists of three different networking opportunities: Braindate, Customer Network Center, and Meetings on Demand.
We created a visual system that unified the three experiences, while providing differentiators for each.
Braindate, our most common networking opportunity, had it’s own theme of a coffee shop. This theme allowed us to add subtleties, while still adhering to the general look and feel of the zone as a whole. Coffee shops are natural spaces where people engage in conversations and collaborate with strangers and friends, practice creativity and productivity, and generally feel comfortable. The variety of seating options coffee shops often offer, was exactly what we wanted to offer our guests for different types of conversations and group sizes. We got creative with messaging, and used coffee “stamp cards” as gamification to encourage attendees to sign up for more Braindates.
