Week in the Study Leave—Episode 02: Research methods
By: Livia Hakala
Tags: Play, User Experience Design, Service Design, Employee Engagement, Masters Degree

Which research methods?

I have been pondering about which UX research methods to use in order to collect qualitative data on employee experiences of my interest (e.g. learning journeys, development discussions, feedback sessions, 1:1 meetings e.g.)

I’m already familiar with a number of methods however I have been questioning myself wether exist methods that would be more “appropriate” or empathetic for such contexts (which can be rich in emotions and taboo topics such as trust or money, for example) in contrast to usual methods commonly used in customer experiences research.

I had a few informal interviews with service designers to hear about their processes and research methods for designing for employee experiences. I wanted to hear of specific methods they had used in EX cases, if and how they have differed from the choices in CX cases. One of the designers was someone who had been involved with a project that sparked my interest because it baked playfulness in the personal development context.

A key insight emerged from these conversations was that Double Diamond and similar established processes used in service design may not feel iterative enough for the employee experience context. In short, the common opinion was that co-creation with end-users must occur as often and early as possible. The approach of spending time on deep understanding before any concept prototyping, specially in employee experience design context, slows down the process and may affect user’s perception of the value proposition. The approach needs to follow a more lean startup mindset (build, measure. learn).

Designing for employee experience should be much more about facilitating stakeholders to re-imagine their ways of working and giving them tools to do that, rather than delivering value-add solutions.

How is Empathy part of this?

The aim of my research is to find ways how a workplace can better support employees in their personal development. While I am at making the process more employee centric, I also want to explore the possibility of making the self-development journey as fun and enjoyable as possible.

—Hello! I’m Empathy, the buzz word 👋 I’m often invited to make reference to someone’s capacity to imagine and try to experience the emotions, thoughts or lives of others.

Empathy is a passion theme of mine, I recently chose to write about it on my my first Medium post and I’m happy I did it. I’ve been recently thinking a lot about this, actually believe motherhood might have ignited it on a new level. I need to practice more empathy and everyone else in this world is needing it, too. As a designer I don’t ever have a feel I do enough of it – it’s actually part of my own personal development.

So I have decided that by personal development I’m framing a more holistic look at employees as humans. So, beyond growth within the professional scope and technical skills, with my research I want to expose how employees strive to be not only better professionals and colleagues, but also aspire to grow their skills in being better citizens, partners, parents, friends.

Could the workplace support us in our holistic personal development? Could the workplace at least learn to look at employees with the holistic lenses instead of the simplistic value-creating human resources view? Then maybe we could develop more empathetic processes, that could perhaps contribute to a higher perception of meaningfulness of work and support people achieve life goals holistically.

Stats this week

Location Laurea, Oodi, my workplace

Watching Watchmen, Silicon Valley S06, The Walking dead🤦🏾‍♀

Reading A few articles about experience research, design games

Happy moments Slept late, participated in a sketching workshop 😍🖍️