DNV
DNV is an international expert in risk management and assurance; safeguarding life, property, and the environment in a number of sectors including Maritime and Energy.
Tasks
Workshop facilitator
User research (1-2-1 interviews)
Data analysis
Persona development
Context
DNV is a multi-faceted beast; Marketing wanted to understand how their users engaged with the different business units, where key touch points existed in external communication areas for the customer and how to improve the user experience as a whole.
Problem
Marketing DNV with its multiple business areas and vast array of products is challenging given the international nature of the company especially when certain business areas also competed against each other for client attention.
How to extract key information from user research to pinpoint areas of value and breaking the company down into digestible chunks would be the start of data collection to collate personas for business focus.
Limited transparency of business wide KPIs
Key user groups not yet identified
Understanding overarching communication touchpoints
Identify pain points and opportunities
Internal User Experience
In order to focus on key pain points across the multiple DNV departments, I needed to understand internal user needs and pain points regarding areas of the business. I did this by:
Facilitating virtual workshops
1-2-1 interviews
Workshops
DNV user touchpoint workshop
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Participants used a whiteboard tool (Miro) to place 'sticky note' comments to questions
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Questions were divided into sections relating to participants business areas
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Conversations were encouraged to help generate participant engagement
Outcomes
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Identified key user journey blockers across business areas
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Highlighted priority user experience touch points
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Provided a basis to affinity map data and start to create personas for project sponsors
Interviews
"The main concern I have is we don't know what other business areas are working on..."
"DNV are easy to interact with, but communication can often get muddled."
Outcomes
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Conducting multiple 1-2-1 interviews per business area provided data supporting the insights from the workshops
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Added additional insights to user experience regarding journeys and interaction touch points
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Helped provide nuanced data to add to crafting overall personas
Personas
Through data synthesis of workshop and interview data each business unit was provided with personas of users. This was to ensure focus on their needs and challenges. As well as opportunities to engage with the users and how to establish a quality user experience.
Persona examples
Key points
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Each business unit acts as separate entity to another - causing them to compete against each other and siloed working
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Communications across the business units regarding product lines and expertise were not impactful enough to users
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Overall DNV are highly regarded for the quality of their output - why isn't this being shouted about regarding certain business units
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More focus on the customer; by cross-selling DNV expertise across business units shows more care for the customer and will keep them coming back
Outcome
After collating each business area personas and validating them, a report providing a SWOT analysis and recommendations was provided for senior stakeholders
Takeaways and learnings
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Scanning the monolith - this was not an ordinary persona exercise; this was about identifying regular users of DNV's services across comms channels, sales and the various business areas. In short this was a mammoth task and it made delivering workshops in person and remotely difficult
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One size does not fit all - we tried to use the same workshop method across business units but it didn't work well owing to the multi-faceted nature of some of them. I had to edit the workshop format on a number of occasions to get most value
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Into the weeds - key stakeholders wanted high-level personas but often in workshops we'd get take off course and going into too much nuance. That's fine but time poor and legacy thinking made 'buy in' much harder at points
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Late to the party - priming key stakeholders with preliminary resource to provide for the workshop participants is something we arrived at late. More consulting would have been beneficial to waste less time