Employee Support, Reimagined

The Situation

The organization wanted to scale internal HR operations through smart technology — virtual agents, automation, self-serve tools. The risk was real. Done wrong, scaling support can feel like withdrawing it.

 

Before anyone designed anything, the team needed to understand what employees actually wanted. Not what HR assumed they wanted. What they actually expected when something went wrong, something changed, or something was new.

 

My Role

UX Researcher, partnering with another researcher on study design, synthesis, and stakeholder communication. I owned the experience personas, the dimensions framework, and the forward-looking guidelines for evaluating design ideas.

 

The Approach

The research surfaced something more nuanced than the self-serve vs. white-glove framing suggested.

 

Individual contributors wanted human support for the moments that felt personal. Navigating parental leave. Understanding their options during a life change. The stakes were high and the emotional context mattered. Self-serve worked fine for routine tasks but not when the situation felt unfamiliar or consequential.

 

Managers had a different problem. They wanted to direct their teams to self-serve information without always being the person being asked. The burden of being the informal HR help desk was real. They wanted tools and resources they could point to, not just handle themselves.

 

Directors and VPs wanted human support at the edges. Pushing on new best practices, navigating ambiguous situations, creating something that didn't exist yet. They weren't looking for answers. They were looking for thought partners. Three distinct support needs. A spectrum that varied by role, situation, and what was actually at stake.

 

From that, I developed experience personas and a set of dimensions that gave the HR and experience teams a shared language for evaluating design ideas. Not prescriptive rules. A thinking tool.