The Client
The National Safety Council is a nonprofit focused on eliminating workplace and roadway injury through awareness, education, and training. The organization serves a wide audience including CEOs, managers, industry experts, as well as the general public.
The Project
This six month project involved designing and building an assessment tool that provides members deeper insight into their workplace safety standing (basically what's working and what needs improvement) and a personalized action plan for how to improve.
The Outcome
The assessment tool, along with the technical behind-the-scenes work, offers users deeper insight into their safety maturity and provides detailed steps on how to improve. The business gains a better understanding of its users, greater opportunity to utilize site personalization resulting in increased engagement and course enrollment.
Understanding the problem
While NSC has a large library of content and robust course offerings, engagement and participation was low. The primary revenue streams, membership and course enrollment, had plateaued and became a key focus for improvement.
Previous engagements with NSC had focused on updates to page templates, navigation, and calls to action. Through that work user personas had been created and were leveraged extensively here. User feedback also played a big role in how the team understood the problem and approached the solution.
Setting goals
While the assessment was a key way for users to gain insight into their safety standing, it was also a catalyst for rethinking and improving how NCS collects, manages, and leverages customer data. The assessment forced the project team to address these data challenges head on.
The project also made it clear that there are ample opportunities to link points of engagement with members including site experience, courses, events, local chapters, and email. Given the intent of the assessment the following goals were set. Our team worked with the client to set identify benchmarks and set targets and track progress.
High-level business goals:
Add value for existing members and strengthen reputation as the go-to safety experts
Better organize, manage, and utilize content across the site
Consolidate customer data
Create a more personalized site experience
Measurable outcomes:
Increase engagement with content and resources
Increase enrollment in online and in-person courses
Increase purchases from the NSC store
Increase new memberships as well as renewals
Data and technical considerations
While the assessment was a way to help users gain insight into their safety standing, it was also the catalyst for rethinking and improving how the organization collects, manages, and leverages customer data. The assessment forced the project team to address these data challenges head on.
The challenge was to ensure a strong foundation that would enable the assessment but also be an investment for future efforts including site personalization, email marketing, analytics, and member portal enhancements.
Working with the development team, I tied user flows to data flows and platform integrations to help stakeholders understand LOE and budget impacts and ultimately make a decision on what would be tackled in phase one vs future phases of work.
Various concepts were explored with and without a Customer Data Platform
Exploration and iteration
This project presented me with several key area of focus. I categorized these areas into three phases: pre-assessment assessment, and post-assessment.
In the pre-assessment phase users needed to be made aware of the assessment, it's potential benefits, and easily enable them to participate. This includes a dedicated landing page that offers details on the assessment as well as leveraging existing components across the site like banners and CTAs.
The post-assessment experience focused on the results landing page that displays results and presents a tailored action plan. This phase also needs to consider how the site may adapt post-assessment as well as any additional correspondence via email.
The team explored several concepts on how best to present results and the action plan to users
Lo-fi wires were used to help stakeholders visualize how users might engage content post-assessment
Thinking big picture
This project presented the perfect opportunity to create a vision for the assessment and the boarder changes needed to support it.
By thinking bigger picture and not limiting ideas early on, stakeholders were able to help us create a vision that included the "big ideas" and wish list items. The idea is to begin to understand how this thing might evolve and better prepare.
Capturing the vision entailed designing a lo-fi wireframe using insights uncovered during discovery, user feedback, and business goals. How would the assessment work if we could do everything tomorrow? How can all the data be leveraged? Some of the future enhancements identified included:
Tracking and communicating progress against the action plan
Versioning assessments so users can track progress over time
Offering comparison tools to other safety professions by role, industry, and location
Ability to share results results with company management and prompt co-workers to take the assessment
Encouraging non-members to join with course discounts and exclusive content
The vision also has the benefit of getting the stakeholders (and leadership) excited about what could be!
Early wireframing helped the team build a backlog of future features and functionality
Successes and outcomes
Designing and building the assessment tool for NSC was a project that checked a lot of boxes. A trusted (and excited) client parter looking to our team for their expertise. A clear mission and vision without rigid requirements. A chance to synthesize design, data, dev, testing
The NSC stakeholders were thrilled with the assessment, results page, and the groundwork laid to help improve their customer data situation.
I was asked to present the final designs at the NSC board meeting where leadership praised the outcome and progress towards the goals.
Existing site components needed adapt to help raise awareness and direct users to the new assessment tool
A custom survey design was created after third party options proved too limiting
The post-assessment action plan offers users a curated list of resources and clear next steps
Challenges and Lessons Learned
The assessment project went well. The client was excited and the team finished proud of the work we did. Of course, there are always things you wish went differently and things to improve upon next time:
Get aligned early-this project has a lot of moving pieces and unlike changing up a page layout, work with survey data, analytics, CDP platforms, and other teams can move slowly and have consequences if not nailed down early.
Get excited about the possibilities-this project was a great example of knowing where you want to go know means an more accurate foundation can be built the first time.
Thinking bigger picture with the data-how can we use assessment information to 1) drive the assessment action plant but also personalize the site, customize email campaigns, refine user personas, drive what content is created in the future, etc.
Membership offers enough to entice folks to joining without giving away too much. Members should never have to question if their annual fee is worth it.
Thanks for visiting my portfolio, it really means a lot!