Case Studies Revamp

Problem

Company projects were spread across the website in a disorganized way, making them challenging find. Once found, the information would be displayed in an inconsistently between projects and many times incomplete.

‘I grasp Hitachi Energy’s long history, but it is difficult to find projects similar to mine which they have worked on in the past or a currently working on’

Client

Needs to actively search for projects across product pages, news and reports

‘It is hard to display our experience and know-how if we rely on constantly updating internal slides and regularly asking Business Units about information on their latest projects’

SALES MANAGER

Repeatedly requests updated projects’ information when presenting to prospects

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Proposal & Process

The proposal was to standardize projects by structuring them as Case Studies and cataloging them through a centralized tool. This tool would empower users to easily sort and filter by predefined categories.

It was necessary to go through the following steps:

1. Collect throughout the website all existing pages that meet the Case Study criteria
2. Clean-up and sort through the collection
3. Brainstorm, define and agree on a tagging/categories system that would work within all Business Units
4. Tag each Case Study individually matching the desired tagging system
5. Analyze existing Case Studies to find patterns in information that should be displayed
6. Go through the template creation process with stakeholders
7. Migrate existing pages into Case Studies
8. Design, develop and test the filter and sorting component
9. elease the new component and include in multiple product pages

Step 3,4,5 and 6 were interconnected and required to be re-runed in several iterations.

Result

The initiative provided 4 deliverables:

The most impactful was the Case Study Selector, a component that displays descriptions and links to all Case Studies. It allows users to filter between 7 possible categories. The component can be configured in the backend to provide the most relevant filters on each page. The second iteration allowed to showcase a limited amount on Case Studies based on criteria set on the backend.

A new Case Study Template and writing guidelines to use it. Existing projects’ references needed to be re-written to fit a Case Study Template. Editors were led by the Case Studies guidelines which showed description to each section, example texts, and best practices.

A centralized backend system. All Case Studies are now stored in a simplified folder structure in the Content Management System. This makes content updating easier since editors can filter and browse through all pages in the backend without needing to traverse through the entire website folder structure.

A tagging system. A uniform set of 120+ tags from 5 categories (Offering, Markets, Country, Specific Products, Voltage) that is suitable for the complex products and services range of all Business Units.

Impact

The new Case Study Selector brought momentum to the importance of showcasing the company’s projects to customers. This started a culture shift within the product marketing teams so that new Case Studies are published every week and the content quality of older Case Studies was improved.

The number of monthly visits for Case Study pages compared to their corresponding original pages doubled or tripled. From a low average 400 monthly views up to 1500, and in many cases grew from 0 to 1,000 monthly visits.

The Sales team benefited from receiving updated information about the company’s projects using the website as an initial source of truth. This also allowed for more transparency when sharing information to customers since most of it is now publicly available.

Products, News and Events pages can now be easily connected with relevant Case Studies by having a Case Study Selector limited their topic in a section of the page. This allows for better storytelling and adding context to the page’s content.

Challenges

This initiative faced many difficulties among them:

• Harmonizing Case Studies’ tags, creating a system that would work across Business Units and be future proof (at least for a couple of years) took a 60% of the project’s timeline. Having to lead multiple workshops with 30+ stakeholders, dozens of cleanup sessions and infinite emails was very challenging and many times frustrating. Through mediations and facilitating the collaboration across Business Units were we able to reach a unchanging collection of tags.
• Categories with number values could not use predefined tags, these could vary from 0.005 to 125,000,000 of the corresponding energy related units. This is due to products and services in projects could be in any stage of the energy grid. We had to design a one of kind slider filter that could group values in a logical way.
• Fishing content that would later be converted into Case Studies was challenging since it was a new structure of writing that was not initially defined by marketing teams in the company. This content came from news, events, references, and part of product pages. Rewriting them to fit the new structure sometimes required additional research to complete the information shown.

Role

This initiative required me to wear two hats:

Project Manager

• Coordinated creation of Tagging System (easier said than done, read challenges)
• Managed communications about release to editors and content owners
• Release the new component and include in multiple product pages

User Experience Consultant

• Analyzed the content in existing Case Study pages + check for redundancy & content relevance
• Established requirements for Case Study template and writing guidelines
• Go through the template creation process with stakeholders
• Collaborated on the Design, development and testing the filter and sorting components
• Release the new component and include in multiple product pages

Learnings

From this project I got three main takeaways:

1. A great product is the one that can start a culture adjustment in an organization. Before the Case Study Selector, content on existing projects were peripheral and eclipsed by new products and services. After the Case Studies became easier to understand, find, and update: they gained meaning.
2. Working across departments that are siloed can become a never-ending job if you don’t keep an eye on time. It is important to set expectations and deadlines to avoid the project from extending itself.