Design Thinking for HR: Transforming Employee Experience EX

Explore how empathy drives design thinking and innovation in HR, using real-world examples like the CT pirate island adventure machine and oral-b upgrades to create user-centered solutions.

Create a user persona as a visual tool to capture demographics, needs, goals, and motivations of HR stakeholders. Apply it to onboarding for remote employees to boost engagement.

Visualize the customer journey map as a stepwise guide, detailing awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, and post-purchase stages with actions, touchpoints, thoughts, feelings, pain points, and opportunities.

Learn how empathy maps help you step into others' perspectives by mapping what people say, do, think, and feel, and apply this to user personas in HR design thinking.

Define stage turns empathy insights into a clear, user-centered problem statement, guiding design toward root causes. Master root-cause analysis techniques like five whys and fishbone.

Master the five whys technique for root cause analysis by identifying and clearly defining the problem, then asking why through iterative questions to uncover the underlying cause and lasting solutions.

Explore the fishbone diagram for root cause analysis, its contrast with five whys, and how to map multiple factors across material, method, machine, and environment in service and manufacturing contexts.

Frame problem statements with detail and metrics to unify teams, clarify outcomes, and address defects, supply chain impact, and performance losses.

Explore the ideate phase of design thinking by generating many ideas in the collection stage and deferring judgment. Apply prioritization frameworks to evaluate and refine the best ideas.

Brainstorming drives the ideate stage by collecting as many ideas as possible, encouraging outside-the-box thinking, and visualizing ideas with boards and sticky notes for rapid, diverse collaboration.

Apply the Scamper technique to enhance HR brainstorming, exploring substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, and reverse ideas for innovative design solutions.

After gathering good and out-of-the-box ideas in phase one, this lecture focuses on prioritization to select the most valuable and feasible ideas for development, using voting and other powerful techniques.

Use an effort–impact matrix to plot ideas by potential impact and required effort, prioritizing quick wins and high‑value projects to guide decision making.

Apply MoSCoW method to categorize ideas into must have, should have, could have, and wouldn't have. Use goals, resources, and metrics to shape onboarding for remote employees at Spark Labs.

Explore how the Kano model classifies features by basic, linear, exciters, and reverse categories to map functionality and customer satisfaction, guiding ideation and competitive benchmarking in design thinking.

Explore prototype as a rough draft in a design thinking process, using a scrappy replica to validate ideas before building the MVP for real users.

Explore common prototype terminology, from hand-drawn sketches and cardboard or Lego models to role plays, wireframes, mockups, and storyboards that map user flows and journeys.

Discover the test phase of design thinking through user testing, observation, interviews, surveys, and a/b testing; analyze feedback, report results, iterate, and verify outcomes to improve the prototype.