Immersive HCD training for agency staff

Building internal capacity in human-centered design across Michigan’s unemployment insurance agency

background

Michigan's Unemployment Insurance Agency (UIA) supports millions of workers through complicated transactions at vulnerable moments. The surge in unemployment during the pandemic had made clear just how high the stakes were and reinforced the agency’s need for a human-centered approach.

context

UIA leadership knew that managing the agency’s customer experience challenges long-term required deep internal expertise in human-centered design.

UIA manages a complex and ever-shifting set of services. Unemployment insurance is famously confusing to apply for, and policies and requirements change frequently—meaning public-facing resources require ongoing adjustments, maintenance, and communication. To keep customers at the center of every decision throughout this evolving work, UIA wanted to embed a more customer-centered way of working into the agency's culture. But leadership knew this would take more than a one-off workshop or training.

This is about the methods and learning, building skills, creating access points for claimants and employers that will help aid adoption. It’s not just about the outcome, but also the capacity building, institutionalizing this way of thinking.

— Project Sponsor, Michigan UIA Staff

challenge

Staff felt unprepared to take on high-stakes design challenges—from streamlining complicated application instructions to communicating complex internal policy changes to staff—without external support.

While partnering with Civilla on a redesign of their Claimant Roadmap, UIA saw firsthand the impact of human-centered design methods on outcomes. Prior to the redesign, residents struggled through the application process—unclear instructions led to frequent mistakes, frustration, and roadblocks. The success of the new roadmap showed how centering the experience of workers, employers, and UIA staff through in-depth interviews and observations can uncover pain points that would otherwise go unseen.

But this approach still felt like a departure from the status quo. Leaders recognized that HCD was not yet central to the agency’s culture or competency, and future projects would continue to require vendor support.

Two women converse at a busy indoor event, seated at tables with others. One woman gestures with her hands while speaking, and people in the background chat in a well-lit, modern space.

goal

Our goal was to help UIA build internal capacity for designing a human-centered unemployment benefits system.

learning

Building on conversations with UIA leadership and staff, we designed an intensive facilitated program tailored to UIA’s learning goals.

learning objectives

To orient the learning design process, we worked with UIA leadership and staff to define a set of learning objectives that would set participants up to lead HCD work independently.

Build a strong foundational knowledge of HCD: Provide a shared language around key theories and methods, such as user experience, in-depth qualitative interviewing, iterative prototyping and testing, and storytelling to build stakeholder engagement.
Grow comfort with new skills: Give staff low-stakes opportunities to practice, make mistakes, and build fluency.
Make progress on real projects: Identify internal projects to serve as practice environments that also moved the needle on real work.
Set the foundation for mindset shifts: Help staff transfer a new way of working to their next project, and the next project after that.

A group of people sit around a table in a modern, sunlit room, listening to a woman standing and presenting near a wooden geometric structure and large windows.

designing the experience

With these objectives in mind, we designed a six-month program consisting of small-group workshops, team coaching, real-world assignments, and public presentations.

UIA identified 25 staff members to participate in the program, which was led by design and teaching experts from Civilla and scaffolded by strong support from UIA leadership.

A small conference room with rows of empty black chairs facing a TV screen, large windows letting in sunlight, and colorful pillars in the background.

format

Staff were split into six project teams, each focused on a real project relevant to an internal operational challenge, allowing them to actively practice theories and skills as they learned them.

Following a two-day in-person launch event, where participants learned core HCD concepts and scoped their projects, staff attended two-hour workshops led by Civilla staff every two weeks for the next six months. They took their projects through a facilitated design sprint covering the full HCD process, from project planning through research, prototyping, testing, implementation and storytelling. Between workshops, staff applied learnings to their projects and received individualized coaching from Civilla designers to troubleshoot challenges and get feedback on progress. The program culminated in a final in-person presentation, where participants shared and celebrated their learnings, progress, and next steps with leadership and other staff.

A group of people stands in a circle, listening to a man in a blue jacket speaking near a whiteboard covered with colorful sticky notes and diagrams in a modern office space.

projects

Projects were focused on small-scale internal UIA operations instead of large, complex, public-facing challenges. This offered staff a low-risk opportunity to hone new research, design, and testing skills, while still pushing real projects forward.

Each team identified a relevant challenge and scoped a project around it:

Design an engaging, flexible online training for community organizations that help people apply for unemployment benefits.
Redesign the newsletter to be more useful and engaging for employers.
Understand the current needs and pain points of new UIA hires, and redesign an aspect of the onboarding experience.
Design training modules to help high-performing UIA staff as they adopt new managerial responsibilities.
Redesign the communications template for sharing internal policy changes with UIA staff.
Redesign the internal UIA SharePoint site where staff training materials are stored.

A group of six people collaborate in a workshop, gathered around a large board displaying sketches and notes on paper sheets. One person points at the board while another writes with a marker.

leadership participation

While agency staff were the program's core participants, its design recognized that leadership support is essential to both successful professional development and lasting culture change.

UIA leaders were engaged from start to finish. The program opened with a workshop for leadership that clarified their role in supporting team projects, building alignment, and creating the conditions for innovation across the organization. From there, participants led two formal presentations to leadership of their in-progress work. These were key moments of exchange where teams showcased their learning and growth, and leaders reaffirmed their investment in the work.

We don’t often get the time and space to dedicate this type of work… seeing how far they’ve come in the last six months has been amazing to watch as a leader.

— Project Sponsor, Michigan UIA Staff

outcomes

At the program’s end, participants showed how they’d made measurable progress on internal projects, and reported several mindset shifts with the potential to rewrite how the agency approaches operational and customer experience challenges.

Four people collaborate around a whiteboard covered in colorful sticky notes during a brainstorming and sorting workshop session.

team outcomes

Tangible developments and a new sense of empowerment

By the end of the program, teams had done discovery research, developed and tested material prototypes, and refined designs that were ready to implement.

The Community Partner Training team

developed a modular, interactive online curriculum to help community organizations confidently answer unemployment-related questions. Drawing on interviews with partners across the state, they designed short lessons that use plain language, quizzes, and scenario-based learning to make complex information easier to understand and fun to learn. The prototype model lays the groundwork for a more equitable, accessible training experience across Michigan’s partner network.

The Employer Advisor Newsletter team

redesigned UIA’s employer-facing newsletter to be clearer, more engaging, and easier to navigate. Through interviews and user testing, they learned that readers wanted concise, visually organized content and proactive information about upcoming changes. Their prototype introduced new colors, layout, and navigation that improved readability and created a more modern, trusted communication channel.

The New Hire Onboarding team

uncovered how a lack of standardization and unclear ownership created frustration for both managers and new employees. After research showed that assumptions about core users were wrong—analysts, not managers, lead the work that leads to a successful onboarding—the team prototyped a comprehensive onboarding checklist that clarified responsibilities and timelines across departments and illuminated broader opportunities for future process improvements.

The New Manager Curriculum team

designed a structured learning plan to help new managers build confidence in both administrative and people-leadership skills. They mapped a six-month curriculum combining HR orientation, technical systems training, and leadership development. Their prototype addressed critical knowledge gaps and proposed ways to reinforce learning over time.

The Field Release Template Redesign team

transformed a lengthy, difficult-to-read document into a simple, visually clear, two-page format that highlights key information upfront. The team entered the process with some skepticism about the need for a redesign at all—the template worked fine for those who filled it out. But thanks to research and testing, they learned this was not the case for the staff who actually received the field releases. Through multiple rounds of testing, the team balanced user feedback with agency standards to produce a final design that is both efficient and user-friendly, and ready to be implemented agency-wide.

The Internal Training Site team

tackled a longstanding pain point: managers regularly struggled to find and access training materials for their teams. The redesigned SharePoint homepage organizes resources by area and topic, creating a true “one-stop shop.” Feedback from staff highlighted how intuitive and empowering this new approach felt, shifting attitudes from frustration to enthusiasm about ongoing learning.

These successes bolstered participants’ confidence, offering real evidence of their expanded capacity to work in a human-centered way. Participants described the sense of agency and possibility offered from building out their knowledge and seeing its impact on real challenges.

individual outcomes

Expanded understandings of “expertise”

Participants reported a significant shift in how they approach challenges: instead of prioritizing institutional priorities and relying on their own instincts or past experience to solve a problem, staff noted that the program had shown them the value of centering the needs and lived experience of those closest to the problem. Teams were surprised by how much they learned from interviews with users.

The most challenging part was taking myself out of the project and listening to what our users needed… we tend to want to give them what we think, versus what they want.

— Participant, Michigan UIA Staff

organizational outcomes

A shift from compliance to need-finding

One of the most consistent changes that participants reported was moving from “doing the work right” to “solving the right problem,” acknowledging that the most pressing problems for users were often unrelated to institutional compliance requirements.

Two presenters stand beside a screen displaying The Challenge slide listing staff feedback about field release issues, while audience members watch from the foreground.

storytelling

From bland updates to compelling user-centered stories

Storytelling was centered as a key skill for participants, and presentations were included as important milestones. Storytelling templates and coaching supported participants in not just speaking to tasks and timelines, but to the human stories at the core of their projects. Using insights and quotes from their research, staff succeeded in making compelling cases about pain points and the need for change.

conclusion

A learning experience that supports skill building and culture change

Five people stand indoors, smiling at the camera. They are dressed in business casual attire. The background has modern office decor with bright lighting and colorful walls.

This program showed that investing in immersive human-centered design training can support individual projects while planting the seeds for a culture of curiosity, empathy, and continuous improvement that can ripple far beyond a single cohort. Real project wins gave participants, leadership, and other agency staff tangible proof of this: by the program’s end, several participants had already been invited to bring their HCD skills to other agency initiatives.

But skill-building alone doesn’t shift culture. The program’s success hinged on the structural involvement of UIA leadership—a recognition that lasting change requires ongoing support from the highest levels.

By owning the human-centered design process from end-to-end—from identifying the issue, to doing interviews, brainstorming ideas, testing prototypes, and working through implementation—staff and leadership experienced firsthand how it can lead to meaningful change, even if solutions are relatively modest. In their final survey, one participant wrote: "I have hope again." Another said, "I didn't think things at UIA could change, now I know they can."

I used to think when you had a problem to solve you relied on your own thoughts or what had been done previously, but now I think I need to consult the people that are impacted by the problem.