2013-16 | Lead UX Designer | DNVDNV are renewable energy experts who provide engineering consultancy and software tools for the industry. As their first ever design hire, I was tasked with overhauling decades of legacy products and fostering a more design-mature, user-centric culture.
Background
DNV’s applications are industry standard for renewables engineers, and used to aid in the design of wind turbines, offshore platforms, and the layout of wind farms and solar PV plants.
For DNV though, the ageing applications took too long to update and maintain, and having been built by industry experts, they featured a steep learning curve and significant usability problems. They now needed to be rebuilt as a modern product suite, presenting the opportunity to streamline and redesign them. But with twenty years of tech-led, unstructured development and near zero internal understanding of users, the design challenge ahead was huge.
To set the department up for success shipping better products in future, teams also needed to be up-skilled in user research and testing, design fundamentals and modern product management.
Work & Outcomes
Starting small, my initial work focused on improving usability for new releases. Embedded in Agile development teams, I learned a great deal about lean, iterative development and how product, design and engineering can collaborate well.
I conducted user interviews to establish archetypes, needs, workflows and pain points. As my familiarity with the industry and customers grew, I was able to confidently redesign more complex applications and de-risk bigger changes through user testing and small-scale pilots. I also designed two entirely new applications from scratch, used for laying out windfarms and solar PV plants.
I trained up product managers and developers in user story mapping as a new format for capturing requirements and managing product backlog, then moved the training on to usability testing. With newly trained developers successfully running their own research and tests, I established standards for tracking usability and overall product health over multiple releases.
Towards the end of my time at DNV, I delivered a vision for how all of it’s products could be streamlined into an integrated product suite. I built a design system for the gradual rollout of a new UI, and guidelines for which UX patterns best suited different user types and workflows. Finally, I leant on my experience as a graphic designer and delivered a brand identity overhaul for the suite. I showed how co’ordinated naming, terminology, visual design and iconography could successfully tie all of DNV’s products together.
