Employee Experience Design Crash Course

Wicked HR problems are challenges that cannot be easily solved, but need deeper understanding. We'll look at how to discover these HR-problems and how they can be the start of your EX-design process.

When we want to learn about EX-design we first need to take a look at the experience economy we're living in now.

Frameworks can help you to understand the concept of Employee Experience better. We give you a quick overview of the main books and frameworks on EX out there.

Frameworks are nice, but they don't get you from a to b. EX-design does. You'll learn what it entails and how to approach it.

Design Thinking is at the basis of EX-design. We give you a few examples of how this is applied in different fields and you will learn how to judge if design thinking is the right answer to your challenge.

Design Thinking is not a linear process, but to learn it, we approach it in a linear way. In this lecture, we go through the process at a high level so you understand the different elements of it, before we dig in deeper. You can print the process if you want to.

In this part, we shortly explain the case study you can use throughout the course. If you just want to learn the theory and not apply it right away, you can skip this part for now.

The first step of the design thinking process is to empathize with your users. This starts with research. In this chapter you'll learn about the different research approaches and we dive into the interview as a research tool.

The empathy map is a famous tool for generating empathy with your user. It allows to look for and summarize the main needs and wants of your user.You can download the template of the empathy map here.

The employee journey map allows you to visualize a sequence of steps you're user is taking with regards to your challenge at hand. You learn how to use the journey map and you can download the template here. There's also an additional resource to dive into the 'how' of the journey map.

In the define phase, you'll learn how to define your main challenge you want to address. A good question is crucial. You can download the reframed design challenge template here. This template will help you form a good question for the start of your ideation phase.

You'l learn various tools for ideation. From a simple purge to a more complex hexaconnector, in which you find ideas by association and inspiration. You can download the hexaconnector here.

In the converging step of the ideation phase, you'll learn how to make choices with your team. Things like dotmocracy, but also looking at feasibility and value is what you do here. You can download the 'how-now-wow-map' for idea selection here as well as the mindmap for developing your idea.

Now that you selected the most promising idea(s), it's time to prototype the idea or concept, so that you can put it in the hand of potential users and test it out. You'll learn about the most common prototyping tools here.

Based on the feedback of your potential users, you can improve the concept in a few iterations. Just as with interviewing in the research phase, it's important to prepare the test phase with a script and questions. Don't leave it to chance.

Time to create your pitch to help you sell and implement your concept. After all, you will need to get agreement on the concept and resources to get it done. Don't leave this to chance, but prepare properly with our pitch template that is based on research of many successful pitches. You can download The Pitcher here.

So this is it. You crushed it. Print the EX-design process and related tools, so you can keep it close to you when practicing the process in your daily work. Enjoy!