Experience Design in an exit interview

Last week I wrote an article about peak end theory which can be found here

I had a few people ask me for tips on how to find and add peaks and endings, hopefully, I'll do that now.

The good news is that when it comes to finding peaks it pretty easy to spot once you know what you're looking for. There are many ways to find these peaks however this is my four top tips on how to do so.

Tip 1.

Okay, let’s have a look at your employee lifecycle (Macro), you can pick which (Micro) experience of the cycle you would like, this could be the attraction, onboarding or it could be the opposite end of the lifecycle where we are saying farewell.

Once you have chosen (Micro experience), I want you to break it down into Nano experiences, for example, maybe you did:

Employee Lifecycle (Macro) > Offboarding (Micro) > Exit meeting (Nano)

Tip 2.

Okay, so once you have a nano experience (Exit meeting) the next thing is to map out that journey as it is now, this will give you a great overview of the experience and show how the actor moves through that experience it will also start to highlight any gaps in the experience. I have covered mapping in detail here

I like to pretend that the journey is wired up to an ECG monitor showing the heart rate of the experience as it stands now, visually seeing on the monitor the peaks and low points of the experience and being able to pick opportunities to turn the average points into really high impact peaks.

Tip 3.

So we have our experience, we have it mapped out in a storyboard maybe and we have probably made some assumptions on the gaps but remember XD (experience design) is about seeing it via the actor's eyes, not yours… so it time to get audience insight. This is the point where we would reach out to our audience and ask them what matters, what their frustration what in general was sucky about the experience.

It's important not to share your assumptions, ideally, the actor's insight should either underpin your assumptions or throw your assumptions out the window.

Tip 4.

By now you have the data from the audience, you have a storyboard, and you have the gaps. It is easy to turn this experience into a process, it is vital that we apply empathy into everything we do, especially on the exit interviews as remember these are the people that will promote or tell others to join or not join the Org.

When it comes to exit interviews we are then in a unique opportunity where we don’t need to have a teary goodbye. Imagine if on every exit interview we reminded the person of all the great moments they have achieved at the company, like their own personal showreel rather than them just handing over their equipment and job done. We could present them with a care package and a massive thank you letter… we change the complete environment from a dull little office we give them a standing clapping ovation while they leave.

What if we extended that experience and asked them to be part of the business alumni with new people coming into the business, maybe grads and apprentices, this then slowly starts to have the leavers hearts and minds even after they have left the business resulting in a great (ending)

Posted on 08/07/19 - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/experience-design-exit-interview-danny-seals/