By Hank Marquis

The Digital [Human] Experience Formula

Image Credit: pexels.com/@olly

Are you using the Human Experience Formula (HEF) to understand and improve Digital Employee Experience?

In a digital workplace, IT must understand what employees expect and how those expectations compare to the experiences they actually perceive — not in general, but by workgroup. This is the core lens described in Completely Satisfied, where the quality of any digital experience begins with perceptions, expectations, and the gap between them.

Very few IT organizations measure expectations directly. And most perception measurements capture only a small fraction of what shapes experience. The rest is usually inferred from operational indicators, which tell you how the system behaves, not how people experience it.

If your organization is like most, you monitor the technical attributes of digital delivery — the uptime, the latency, the throughput, the logs. These Quality of Service (QoS) metrics are essential, but they only show one side of the story. Satisfaction proxies like NPS or CES might hint at trouble, but they rarely explain it. This leads teams back to operational dashboards, searching for clues that were never there.

QoS is necessary, but it is not enough. To understand digital experience, you must also look outward — from the employee’s point of view — at the Quality of Experience (QoE or QX). The Human Experience Formula describes how people evaluate their experience in relation to their expectations. It is the basis for how human experience is measured across CX, UX, and DEX.

Human Experience = Perception – Expectations

This formula is simple, but its implications are significant. It tells you that experience is not defined by technical performance alone but by the difference between what people expected and what they actually perceived. That gap shapes satisfaction, trust, frustration, and the stories people share about IT.

From a DEX perspective, understanding this formula by workgroup allows IT to assess the quality of the user, customer, and digital employee experience more accurately. It can also change how QoS is interpreted — not as the final answer, but as one piece of a larger experience picture.

Many organizations still aren’t using the Human Experience Formula. They assume that strong technical performance implies a strong experience, or they rely on outdated satisfaction metrics that miss the deeper perception–expectation relationship. But employees today are not technologically naïve. They know how they expect their digital tools to help them achieve meaningful results.

Meeting expectations requires knowing them. It also requires shaping them. That means communicating clearly about what the service can deliver, avoiding over-promising, and explaining the “why” behind constraints or choices. Hiding the truth or oversimplifying technical realities is a fast way to break trust.

Employees are co-creators of enterprise value. Involving them in planning, design decisions, and improvement cycles gives them ownership in the digital environment they depend on. Taking their feedback seriously — and acting on it — is essential.

The Human Experience Formula makes that work possible. It reveals where expectations are drifting from perceptions and helps IT understand what matters most to each group. Performing this analysis manually requires collecting perception data, mapping expectations, interpreting tolerance ranges, and linking the results back to business context — often a long and difficult process.

This is why the formula sits at the center of Hailee’s workgroup digital twin. Hailee uses perceptions, expectations, zone-of-tolerance, and value alignment to explain why an experience feels the way it does and where the real gaps lie. The model is the same; the difference is that Hailee makes it visible in minutes instead of requiring weeks of interpretation.

Creating a positive digital employee experience is essential for organizational performance. Good DEX leads to better outcomes, more focus, and significantly higher productivity. Poor DEX drains momentum and can reduce productivity by more than 30 percent. Understanding the Human Experience Formula is the first step toward knowing why.

Please comment or reach out and let me know what you think, I'd love to talk with you!

Best,
Hank

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