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Case study · UKG

One UKG Experience

Turning two legacy product ecosystems into one unified experience.

Following the merger of Ultimate Software and Kronos, customers encountered different navigation models, interaction patterns, and visual systems across the combined product portfolio. I helped define the experience strategy for progressively bringing those products into a more coherent UKG experience while balancing customer needs, legacy technology, and the realities of modernizing enterprise software at scale.

Challenge

Create consistency across a merged enterprise portfolio without rebuilding every legacy product.

My role

Experience Strategy · Enterprise Design Systems

Shared experience principles, reusable patterns, and a phased modernization approach across products.

Impact

Unified

Suite Experience

A more consistent customer experience across the UKG portfolio.

Company
UKG
Role
Experience strategy · Product design
Scope
Enterprise product portfolio

The challenge

Two product ecosystems needed to become one.

The merger brought together established products with different navigation models, interaction patterns, design systems, and underlying technologies. Customers increasingly experienced those products as one UKG portfolio, but the experience still reflected their separate histories.

The challenge was to create greater consistency without requiring a wholesale redesign of every legacy product.

Two ecosystems
Ultimate Software + Kronos
Mixed patterns
Navigation, interaction, visual systems
Legacy platforms
Modernization at portfolio scale

My role

Co-defined the experience strategy for progressively unifying the portfolio.

I partnered across Product, Engineering, Enterprise Architecture, and UX to define shared experience principles, reusable patterns, and a practical modernization approach. My role connected customer needs and product strategy with the technical realities of evolving large enterprise platforms.

  • Experience strategy
  • Enterprise design systems
  • Product design
  • Customer research
  • Cross-functional alignment

Key decisions

Key design decisions

01

Establish a shared experience vision before converging products

Before individual teams began independently modernizing their products, we established a shared target experience that could align design, product, and engineering around where the portfolio was headed. That gave the portfolio a common destination while allowing each product to evolve toward it over time.

Customer evidence

Cross-product audits and customer feedback showed where inconsistent navigation and interaction models created friction across the portfolio.

Shared principles and a common component library gave teams one reference point instead of product-specific interpretations.

02

Build for adoption, not just documentation

Rather than treating the design system as a reference library, we translated shared patterns into reusable, production-ready components teams could actually adopt — documented states, responsive behavior, and accessibility included. That connected design intent to implementation and made consistency easier to achieve across products.

Documenting states, responsive behavior, and accessibility up front removed the guesswork that slowed implementation.

03

Modernize incrementally instead of all at once

A full portfolio redesign would have been disruptive and unrealistic. We chose a phased approach — starting with legacy Workforce Management — that moved existing experiences toward the shared vision while teams kept shipping customer value. The tradeoff was accepting temporary inconsistency in exchange for implementation feasibility and uninterrupted delivery.

Contextual dashboards surfaced time-sensitive tasks first, turning a legacy product into a modern, compliant daily workflow.

04

Measure convergence, not opinion

We chose to hold the unified experience to evidence rather than preference. A shared scorecard tracked adoption, visitation, retention, NPS, and usability against explicit goals, so decisions about where to converge next were settled by observable customer behavior across the portfolio.

Tracking adoption against shared goals kept progress toward the unified experience measurable rather than anecdotal.

The solution

A shared experience foundation across the UKG portfolio.

The resulting foundation gave product teams a shared set of components, patterns, navigation models, and interaction standards they could apply across UKG products. Rather than requiring every product to redesign simultaneously, teams could progressively adopt the shared experience while continuing to deliver customer value.

The goal wasn't identical screens. It was a consistent interaction model users could learn once and recognize everywhere.

01 · New landing page frameworks

Role-aware landing frameworks built from the shared foundation surface the highest-priority actions at the top of the page based on work context.

Role-aware landing pages promote the highest-priority actions to the top of the page based on work context.

02 · Unified experience

The shared foundation applied inside complex, production-scale workforce experiences: one navigation model, one interaction language, one visual system.

One navigation model and a common landing page framework let customers move across products without relearning the interface.

03 · Reusable components

Production-ready components and written guidance let products move toward the unified experience incrementally, without disruptive full redesigns.

Written guidance alongside every component meant teams applied the same interaction rules without re-deciding them.

Impact

Product + organizational impact

30% Faster

Development velocity

Shared patterns, reusable components, and a common experience foundation reduced duplicate effort and made continued modernization more scalable.

More Coherent

Shared interaction patterns

Previously separate products moved toward one recognizable UKG model.

More Reusable

Common components and workflows

Production-ready building blocks replaced product-specific one-offs.

More Scalable

Foundation across product teams

A phased approach let products modernize progressively, not all at once.

We weren't redesigning one product. We were creating a practical path for two product ecosystems to become one experience.

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