How to Build Experiences Users Actually Engage With

“How do you design learning and skills experiences people actually want to use?”

A lot of skills and learning programs don’t fail because the content is bad. They fail because the experience feels like extra work: hard to find and navigate and disconnected from what people are trying to get done.

To explore what actually changes that, I spoke with Samantha Murray, founder of AlignedCX. Sam has led customer education at Shopify, worked on the vendor side at Docebo, and now advises teams on designing experiences that remove friction and drive real outcomes.

Too much learning is still built on hope. Hope that people will engage and that a new platform will fix the problem. In this episode, we push back on that thinking. We talk about why everyone is a customer, why a product mindset beats “build it, and they will come,” and why empathy and journey mapping are the real starting points for modern L&D. The throughline is simple: if you don’t understand the experience you’re designing for, no amount of content will save it.

Some curious takeaways:

• Treat employees like customers and design for value, not compliance
• Run experiments and ship small, measurable improvements instead of big launches
• Embed learning in the flow of work so behaviour and performance data can power real personalisation

Episode highlights:

(00:00) Welcome to Harald’s Curious Corner

(01:22) Experience design as a lever for business results

(05:36) The product mindset shift in learning

(09:14) Everything is customer, including internal learners

(13:40) Using customer journey mapping to spot the gaps that matter

(16:29) Learning should follow the work, not interrupt it

(21:11) Meeting people in the moment of need across channels

(26:07) The importance of empathy mapping

(28:02) How teams actually execute after mapping

(31:46) The fastest way to go backwards with AI

(37:32) Where implementation actually starts

(39:30) The biggest pitfalls: solutioning too fast and skipping validation

(44:09) What to stop doing in experience design

(45:43) Curious Corner Takeaways

Connect with the guests:

Samantha Murray on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samantha-murray613/

Explore AlignedCX: https://www.alignedcx.com/

Follow me on the following sites:

Harald Overaa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haraldovera/

Subscribe to Harald’s Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901795950403186688/