CX Discovery & Research: Human-Centred Design for Higher Education

This course is designed for anyone working in the higher education sector, including universities, TAFEs and RTOs who want to better understand the current experience of future and current students. If you work outside education, explore our other courses at www.peakxd.com.au/training.

This hands-on, interactive training will show you:

✅ How to plan and conduct effective student research, regardless of your budget.
✅ How to uncover student journeys and pain points to design better experiences.
✅ How to effectively communicate insights and engage challenging stakeholders.
✅ Practical skills and methods that work in a tertiary context aligned with ISO standards

Delivered by PeakXD - a leading Australian CX and service design consultancy - who will share their knowledge and experience conducting research with students from universities and TAFEs across Australia, including UQ, Griffith Uni, Monash Uni, QUT, TAFE Queensland, UniSC, and CQ University, among others.

🚀 Maximise your learning! This course will explore methods to understand the 'problem space' and opportunities for improving the student experience, and is a precursor to our CX Ideation and Service Design course which explores the 'solution space'. Discounted tickets are available when you attend both courses.

Tickets

• 1st course: General admission $747 + GST
• Subsequent courses booked at the same time: Discounted rate of $677 + GST

Who should attend?

✅ CX managers and teams
✅ Student success and engagement teams
✅ Admissions, application and enrolment teams
✅ Marketing and communications teams
✅ School and faculty communications
✅ Service areas e.g., Library, Student Services
✅ Website, digital, and LMS teams

Hands-on activities

If you 'learn by doing' then you'll value our highly practical approach. Activities cover CX fundamentals and how they're applied in the real world:

1️⃣ Affinity diagramming
2️⃣ Conducting low-cost research
3️⃣ Planning research
4️⃣ Conducting user interviews and task analysis
5️⃣ Designing personas
6️⃣ Writing user stories
7️⃣ Customer journey mapping
8️⃣ Writing How Might We (HMW) statements

Course syllabus

Our curriculum is aligned with global ISO 9241 standards on human-centred design, ensuring your CX work is based on best practice. You'll learn human-centred design methods, tools, and frameworks based on our experience working on over 600 CX projects.

Introduction to human-centred design

• What is human-centred design?
• Benefits of human-centred design
• Inclusive design
• Introducing the 'Double diamond' (problem space and solution space)

Kicking off your project and engaging business stakeholders

• Kicking off your project
• Understanding business objectives
• Engaging challenging stakeholders and breaking down silos

Planning and conducting research for student insights

• Designing research for inclusivity
• Low-cost research methods
• Traditional CX research methods
• Qualitative vs Quantitative and Behavioural vs Opinion-based research methods
• How to be a better researcher to gain accurate insights

Analysing and documenting research to build empathy

• Synthesising research data: tools and methods
• Research artefacts to build empathy: personas, empathy maps, and user stories
• Customer journey mapping

Problem framing

• Understand how to reframe the problem based on customer research to wrap up the 'Problem space'
• Create 'How might we?' statements and prepare for 'Solution space' ideation

Your trainers

Tania Lang and/or Miranda Wee will be your trainer for this course.

Tania Lang: Over 20 years' experience as a customer experience practitioner. Industry leader and presenter at UX conferences such as UX Australia Design Research. Has delivered UX training to over 3,500 participants including whole teams in organisations such as ATO, Services Australia, CASA, ANZ, CommBank and several other government agencies and private companies. Highly qualified: M. Bus. (Research) in User Behaviour, Grad. Cert. Human Factors, Grad. Cert in Arts (Marketing) and B.Sc.

Miranda Wee: More than 15 years' experience as a user experience practitioner. Has led UX research, design and testing projects for organisations such as TAFE Queensland, Queensland Ambulance Services, Transport and Main Roads (Smart Ticketing CX rollout) and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Specialises in end-to-end UX—from discovery to design, prototyping, and testing. Passionate about uncovering deep user insights and usability issues to create better user experiences. Skilled in facilitating collaborative design workshops and stakeholder engagement.

Program delivery

This course will be delivered virtually, using Microsoft Teams and Miro. Breaks are scheduled throughout the day to reduce online meeting fatigue and we include plenty of interactive activities and break-out activities, ensuring you won't be just sitting passively watching a presentation all day. The activities have been carefully designed to help you learn in this environment and our trainers, Tania Lang and Miranda Wee are both skilled at creating engaging learning experiences regardless of the delivery mode.

Refund policy

Cancellations received 30 days or more before to the course start date will incur a 25% administration fee. Cancellations received less than 30 days are non-refundable.

If PeakXD postpones or cancels a course (e.g. due to insufficient numbers), attendees can elect to receive a full refund, attend the new date or have their payment transferred to another course.

Read our training policy and conditions for full details.