My Workspace

Workspace Personalization at BNY Mellon
Transforming a Static Dashboard into a Dynamic, Persona-Driven Workspace

Role: UX Design Director | Team : Myself, 1 Poland Designer | Tools: Sketch, Figma, Miro | 2022+

🏦 Business Case

When I joined BNY Mellon, the company’s enterprise workspace platform — designed to serve Operations, Technology, and Reconciliation teams — was seeing minimal adoption. Despite the platform’s potential, it failed to deliver value because it lacked intuitive setup, relevant data, and user-specific customization.

The strategic objective was to transform the workspace into a high-utility, persona-driven productivity hub, with modular data widgets and templates tailored to different user groups. The business aimed to:

Boost workforce efficiency through faster access to relevant data.
Improve user satisfaction and engagement across enterprise tools.
Reduce shadow IT and external dashboarding tools used by teams.

🧭 Challenge

The existing workspace was under 5% utilization due to:

Lack of persona alignment: All users saw the same generic interface, regardless of function.
No template system: Managers couldn’t create or distribute curated workspaces.
Poor discoverability: Users didn’t know how to configure their environments or what tools/widgets were available.
Cognitive overload: Unorganized data made even basic tasks difficult.

The core challenge: Redesign the entire workspace architecture to support personalization, relevance, and scale across varied user needs.

🔬 Research & Discovery

To validate the proposed design solutions, I primarily used user interviews. By using clickable prototypes, I was able to quickly test multiple aspects of the design, such as usability, intuitiveness of navigation, clarity of element naming, and more.

🖼️ UX Deliverables

We built a widget-based workspace framework centered around personalization, modularity, and shareability.

Solution Highlights:

Dozens of new widgets customized per persona, including:
- PPM Tracker
- Deadline Tracker
- MyDocument Library
- Time Tracker
- Template Library
Drag-and-drop layout personalization
Persona-based default templates for fast onboarding
Manager-defined workspace templates to standardize team views
Onboarding modals and contextual tooltips for adoption support
Built using Figma for design, FigJam for collaboration, Jira for sprint tracking

All designs followed internal accessibility standards and supported future extensibility to other personas (e.g., Risk, Compliance).

Adding Widgets went from phone calls to tech to a clean intuitive interface with Access Requests and Guided Narration.

My Ops Workspace

Creating task tickets, monitoring Open Tickets were all handled in one easy widget on everyone's dashboard if they wanted.

Time tracking and time management were integrated into the Workspaces to make timesheets less of a chore.

I worked in a Hamilton widget to live on everyone's workspace so they could post their hamilton tweet anytime.

Some of the key items for Operations were to important to be executed ina widget, but at least the status was shown

The task with Recon widget was to take an entire recon website and condense it into a small square widget.

A placeholder widget acted as a guide and introduction to show users what it could do.

All of the Widgets at zero state had a placeholder walkthrough widget to entice usage and adoption.

🚀 Implementation & Outcomes

📈 Workspace adoption rose from <5% to over 80% within 12 months
🧠 Significant reduction in cognitive load reported via follow-up surveys
✅ Managers reported improved workflow visibility and faster onboarding
💡 Telemetry showed a 3x increase in average widget interactions per session
🔁 Standardized workspaces reduced cross-team friction and tool sprawl

This was one of the first major projects I took on at BNY, and became a benchmark project for internal workspace UX transformation across the organization.

Workspaces were clean and consumable, and most important... users could finally personalize thier pages to what they wanted.

The Workspaces were so popular that we even brought them into Nexen with MyNexen as default page.

✨ Key Takeaways

These weren’t just design takeaways — they became shared insights across the user base, stakeholders, and executive committee, grounded in user research, usage telemetry, and measurable business outcomes:

Relevance drives engagement: Adoption isn’t about packing in features — it’s about delivering focused, persona-relevant functionality. Users gravitated to workspaces that spoke directly to their daily responsibilities.
One-size-fits-all kills usability: Deep persona-based research proved essential. Tailoring experiences to specific user roles unlocked real value and drastically improved satisfaction.
Templates empower teams: By enabling managers to create and distribute curated workspaces, we saw increased team cohesion, faster onboarding, and consistency across departments.
Design Ops matters: Embracing a Figma-first, modular design system accelerated delivery and iteration. It created a replicable model for future workspace and widget development.

These lessons informed not only the future roadmap of the workspace platform, but also shaped broader UX and product strategy discussions within BNY Mellon.