Getting Started with Experience Design

You may have heard about an article by Fast Company about corporate America breaking up with design. This came on the heels of the design firm IDEO, that popularized design thinking, laying off a third of its staff. Does all this mark the end of design as a strategic discipline within organizations?

No. It does not. The need for design has not diminished. If anything it’s increasing as more design approaches to big challenges emerge. For example, there is increasing awareness of the link between employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX), but many leaders do not yet have strategies, approaches and resources allocated to improving critical moments that matter for their employees.

Employee experience needs experience design
Design is a solution to the employee experience challenge. It is a way for companies to discover the lived experience of their employees, to diagnose where the biggest opportunities for improvement lie, and to develop better ways to engage and motivate employees.

This design approach should sound familiar to leaders. After all, customer experience as a strategic focus and as a core functional area in organizations has been around for a couple decades, at least. CX is a strategic application of design that directly affects the bottom line by driving customer satisfaction, differentiation and, ultimately, sales.

Not every company has a full-blown CX function. Often, the concept of customer experience gets confused with user-experience (UX), and companies fail to understand the entire experience of their customer with their service or product. Strategic responsibility for CX typically ends up within marketing. But, taking a holistic approach requires a cross-functional approach that coordinates across marketing, sales, customer service, product development, operations and into HR and IT.

Even fewer companies have a dedicated team working to improve EX. Often employee experience falls under the people function. While this may seem the logical place for EX, HR departments seldom have the resources or the talent and skills to do experience design.

Everyone can participate in the design process and you do not need to be a degreed design practitioner to lead a redesign project.

So, yes, design is still needed inside companies. And, given the changes in workforce expectations and the influence of new technologies like AI, EX is needed now more than ever. We have seen the benefits companies gain when they build a core capability of human-centered design and co-creation within their teams. Everyone can participate in the design process and you do not need to be a degreed design practitioner to lead a redesign project.

Take the first steps

It takes training and coaching and practice to master the experience design process. We encourage organizations to stand up small, cross-functional teams to lead experience design for their more complex and people-focused challenges.

Find natural change makers and give them a challenge to address. Provide them with the resources and the time they need to build the organizational capability of experience design. The investment will reap rewards, both in the innovative new solutions to current issues these change-makers can generate and the skills they gain for tackling design challenges focused on external stakeholders (customers, patients, citizens, etc.) and the people who make your organization tick, your employees.

To help your teams get started with experience design, reshift has developed a toolkit covering one of the first steps of the process: experience mapping. You can download the toolkit by clicking the button below. And, if you need any help thinking through how to get started just let us know by reaching out to info@reshift.us.

Download our free Experience Mapping Toolkit packed with guidelines and templates to conduct design research

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Author Marc Bolick is founder and managing partner of reshift, an innovation support partner for leaders and teams seeking Big Change. He draws on decades of experience in product and service innovation to facilitate collaborative problem solving and drive impact for the most complex challenges organizations face.

14.03.2024

experience design, human-centered design, design thinking, customer experience, employee experience