Making safety personal
Project Overview
Challenge
The National Safety Council (NSC) hired with us as UX consultants, with the goal to improve their overall user experience - both internal and client facing. They wanted to reach their audience with more intention and personalization, hoping to grow site engagement, revenue, and membership.
Solution
I began with a discovery phase, including multiple rounds of research, focus groups, and design thinking exercises. This phase resulted in a prioritized roadmap that highlighted how we could iteratively improve their site and internal workflows.
The project is still ongoing, but we have since redesigned their taxonomy system, navigation, search page, and content types. Our work continues with enhancing page layouts, streamlining the shop experience, unifying the overall brand, and personalizing email and web content. Before each phase of work begins, we conduct user research, and finish each phase with user testing prior to development hand-off.
As we implement each phase, we've created a plan with our data team to add analytics so we can assess, adapt, and update our solutions according to live user data.
Process
Building Trust & Gathering Data
When the project began, NSC let us know they felt they'd been burned in the past by other design agencies. They knew they needed UX help, but they didn't know what was going to make our work better than their previous attempts.
My simple answer - we were going to use the data. I held stakeholder interviews, user focus groups, and 1:1 interviews to understand pain points at each step of the journey. I also factored in data from HotJar and Google Analytics to further explain user thoughts and behavior. With this process, we were able to gain our client's trust and improve their overall site experience.
Personas & Journey Maps
One of NSC's main goals was to increase personalization in campaigns, newsletters, and site content. We used personas and customer journeys to help identify the different reasons users come to the website, the paths they may take, and the problems they could run into. Each persona came with its own "power" - if targeted correctly, what benefit will they bring in return?
I also charted each persona onto an xy-axis to help NSC determine priority and focus. They had a lot of personas, so it wasn't possible to address all their needs at once. By charting out the personas, you were able to clearly see how their "powers" would impact NSC's goals. Some would bring more revenue or memberships while others would increase engagement. This chart was quickly revered by the client, and we often returned to it to facilitate hard conversations with stakeholders and determine project priorities.
Prioritization
Creating a project roadmap is key to every project, but this one was especially important to get the priority right. This project spanned multiple NSC department and initiatives, each wanting their phase to be done first. We were also making adjustments to their site taxonomy, navigation, Salesforce environment, and data governance practices. These are no small tasks and all have a lot of moving pieces!
To make sure we were getting the work we needed done first and stakeholders were feeling heard, I created dependency and priority charts to help determine the final roadmap plan. These charts helped to have the hard conversations, make decisions, and keep the team aligned.
GAllery
