Sustainability Maturity Assessment Tool
Schneider Electric x UNIT9 | 2023
Overview
Project
To help C-suite leaders of Fortune 500 companies assess their sustainability and efficiency maturity, we designed an interactive web experience (available on mobile and desktop) that revealed relevant scores and action items in under 10 minutes.
Team
Creative Director: Joanna WagnerDesign Strategist: Hannah Seckendorf
Experience Designer: Sebastian Ervi
Audience & Brand Research
Workshop Design
Workshop Facilitation
Design Strategy
Creative Strategy
Background
The Problem
C Suite decision makers at large corporations struggle to 1) assess their sustainability maturity and 2) strategize what next steps should be prioritized in their sustainability journey.
The Idea
Schneider Electric imagined a sleek tool with innovative yet intuitive UX that would 1) enable C Suite employees to assess their company’s maturity (relative to the industry average) in under 10 minutes and 2) provide relevant strategic recommendations on what to prioritize to progress their maturity.
The Ask
UNIT9 was tasked with collaborating with Schneider Electric to envision, design, and produce a web-based questionnaire tool for both desktop and mobile that could be used to assess sustainability maturity and provide recommendations powered by Schneider Electric’s database of industry insights.
Approach
Competitive Review & Insight Gathering
Ahead of launching into stakeholder interviews and workshop design, I surveyed the existing landscape of attempts at both 1) assessing sustainability maturity and 2) lead generation surveys. What’s been done? What’s working and where are things falling short? What are the key technical strengths and weaknesses of a web tool? What would appeal most to our specific audience: C Suite employees? These combined insights would be interwoven both into my strategic recommendations as well as the design and broader context of the withorkshops, such that our collective decision making could be informed decision making.
Stakeholder Interviews & Requirements Gathering
The Schneider Electric UX and Marketing teams had their own subject matter expertise to bring to the table. Beyond contributing to my sense of what we needed to pay attention to in the design of the tool, all interviewees were contributing to my Requirements Gathering, which would ultimately shape my understanding of the distinct goals each stakeholder withould be bringing to the workshop table, and form a blueprint of success for our designers, developers, and producers.
Workshop Design & Facilitation
After completing my research, synthesizing my insights, and gathering our requirements, it was time to start designing a kickoff workshop, AKA translating the needs of the client into a highly-structured large group session of knowledge-sharing, ideation, and decision-making. The workshop was to be hosted remote, via Miro.
At the core of each workshop was a goal that looks simple on the surface but brings surprising challenges in large groups of diverse stakeholders: Align on a goal: a north star articulated in shared language that everyone could look to to orient their decision-making throughout our time designing together.
The core structure of the workshop thus leaned upon a structured exercise to align as a group on a very-brief creative brief. With our brief in hand, we moved forward.
Defining a Target Persona
In order for us to thoughtfully design our tool, we were all going to need to have a clear target audience in mind.
After extensive research on the psychology and lifestyles of C-Suite employees, the person standing before me was “Richard,” an imagined composite characted of all the goals, motivations, problems, frustrations, and hopes C-Suite employees tend to embody.
These characteristics were then translated into inferences about what “an ideal experience” would look like for Richard:
What are the sorts of digital experiences that meet his needs? What styles of communication are effective? What modes of interaction are comfortable? What messaging strategies resonate with him?
Translating Audience Needs into Experience Design Considerations
Everything I learned about Richard and Lead Generation Survey design during my research was important because it would inform the Experience Design considerations that I would pass off to our UX Designer, Sebastian.
Sebastian would be responsible for taking the insights of my strategy and bringing them down to earth: turning them into the wireframes that would define the skeleton of our tool.
For this reason, it was important my insights were translated into direct suggestions, such that every UX decision our team made was backed up by a strategic insight. If Sebastian was ever wondering why I suggested a multiple select rather than a drop down option, he could look here to follow my logic through my research.
Translating Experience Design Considerations into User Journey Recommendations
Finally, it was time to take the experience design considerations I had gathered and plot them across a User Journey.
From Discovery
If we could anticipate these things, we could anticipate how we might best keep Richard engaged and in the positive affect space through various thoughtful design decisions.
Armed with these insights, I mapped out Watch Outs and Opportunities for Sebastian to keep in mind as he started to architect our wireframes.
Before any of these files were formally handed off to Sebastian, we first presented them to the client to gather feedback, make sure that they were 100% on board with the strategy that would drive our design, and welcome discussion at points of confusion or disagreement.
Outcome
A Sustainability Maturity Assessment Tool
Following the strategy workflow, I worked closely with our UX and Creative teams to ensure that our audience insights, competitive insights, and stakeholder needs were kept in mind each step of the way.
Both UX and Creative did a great job bringing the vision to life.*
*The screens are a sampling for the sake of representing UI/UX choices, and not representative of the entire flow.