Japanese Corporation's Employee Experience Journey Mapping + Ideation Research

TL;DR:

Along with a larger team of strategists and designers, I conducted qualitative research, created personas, developed a Japanese/English journey map, synthesized and delivered insights, and trained Japanese colleagues in qualitative user research best practices. 

Goals:

We worked with the client's parent company to define further goals to build upon our previous work in Phase 1:

• Train client on best practices for user research to enable them to conduct UX research.
• Discover overlapping pain points and tasks from Phase 1.
• Visualize conceptual opportunities for an ideal employee experience. 
• Prioritize these concepts into a detailed roadmap for a cross-organizational C-suite presentation.

Challenges:

Although we were building on the research conducted in Phase 1, we still ran into complex challenges throughout Phase 2:

• Time difference between US and Japan.
• Language barrier for (some) client participants.
• Inability to conduct quantitative survey.
• Synthesizing interviews conducted by another team.
• Difficulty reconciling different types of research from distinct organizations.

Luckily, my +3 years studying Japanese helped alleviate some of the language barrier. 

Process:

RESEARCH 101 + DISCOVERY

I (and other colleagues) created training materials and taught sessions to enable the IT team in Tokyo to conduct user research. The topics we covered were:

• Foundational Concepts in UXR
• How to Create Interview Guides
• Research Synthesis Methodologies
• Basic Quantitative Skills

Then, the team in Japan used what we'd taught them to conduct 7 qualitative stakeholder and 11 user interviews in Japanese to understand their organization's goals for their internal systems and ongoing employee experience. 

Once we received the transcripts and notes from the interviews conducted by the Tokyo team, I then corrected and double-checked any translation issues to make sure our analysis was accurate.

PERSONAS

Using this set of interviews, I drove the bilingual persona creation effort, and made 4 distinct personas for the Japanese company based on  common roles and tasks that employees typically perform:

JOURNEY MAP

Since the client decided against a large-scale survey similar to Phase 1, we instead created a journey map of a average Japanese employee's work day to capture tasks, pain points, and opportunities pertaining to internal systems and tools.

The main takeaways were:

• Employees face the majority of issues when onboarding, getting assistance from HR or admin, and collaboration between departments.
• For example, mid-career hires don’t typically receive the same level of guidance and training that fresh out of university hires do.
• Also, many internal procedures are in place to track productivity rather than increase productivity. These activities become busywork for employees who have less time to do meaningful work.
• These issues are especially challenging for employees who are foreign expats who do not speak Japanese. 
• While the client continues to hire non-Japanese workers, its internal tools are often unable to operate in English mode.

It was tricky taking the journey map personally from Charlotte, NC all the way to Tokyo, Japan on two airplanes. Unlike the facsimile below, the actual journey map was over 23 feet long, stretching across two walls!

IDEATION WORKSHOP

Then, we used this journey map as the starting point for an ideation workshop:

• Participants filled in any missing tasks or pain points on the journey map using sticky notes.
• Dot voting to determine the highest priority of task type to solve for.
• Blue-sky ideation using the personas I created and their accompanying "How Might We?" statements. 
• Another round of stakeholder dot voting to prioritize the ideas created.
• Using these inputs, we created a set of 6 Guiding Principles for the future employee experience.

Below you can see me presenting the rankings of various tasks from the previous day's workshopping efforts:

CONCEPT VISUALIZATIONS

After further iterating on the ideas from the workshop, our team put them into thematic categories and created visualizations of how they could come to life.

The concept visualizations were composed of:

• A concept title and description based on the employee's JTBD.
• Main features of the concept.
• A high-fidelity mock-up of the concept in action.
• Tags for the problem area: People, Process, or Platform
• Labels for which client would be the primary user of the solution.

INSIGHT OVERLAP + SYNTHESIS

Now that we had tasks, pain points, insights, and guiding principles from both clients, we were able to determine the best way to marry these into one cohesive set of solutions.

Because I'd been involved from the beginning of Phase 1, I was able to synthesize thematic and practical overlaps between tasks and pain points across both organizations, enabling us to create a prioritized roadmap for the implementation of the concepts we'd visualized.

Impact:

Finally, all of these insights and concepts were workshopped in Tokyo with the clients from Phases 1 & 2 so they could align on the timing of the roadmap. 

• Both clients were able to envision a future of a shared online ecosystem, further cementing their partnership after a lengthy acquisition.  
• We delivered a final prioritized roadmap for a future intranet for both companies.
• Two concepts are already underway, with more being pitched in the future using our roadmap, leading to more work for my company!

Overall, this research project took nearly a year and gave me the opportunity to oversee large portions of research while collaborating with data scientists to synthesize quantitative data along with my typical qualitative research.

Learnings:

I learned so much on these two projects, such as:

• The client truly appreciated my efforts to communicate in Japanese, and my burgeoning fluency helped build connections in Tokyo.
• After years conducting research, it was rewarding to be able to teach others these vital skills to grow their organization.
• Generating insights from interviews conducted by another team is yet another exercise in empathy.

While long research projects can feel slow, the momentum built by continually gathering insights can generate hugely impactful outcomes!