Utility Community Research

In this project I focused on...

Identifying language that encourages people to apply for a career in energy
Creating a UX content strategy for a new careers website
Facilitating a goals workshop for utility stakeholders

Qualitative Research

Remote Facilitation

UX Content Strategy

Project at a Glance

About

Before investing in code, a major energy company wanted to know if the content of their new "careers" website communicated their values and employment opportunities appropriately. To find out, I designed a small-scale qualitative study with their target audience members.

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By the end of it, it was clear that the content was resonating with the people they wanted to reach, but that the reading level was too high for the audience. Because of the study design, I was able to pinpoint the exact passages which were too difficult and I was able to give concrete suggestions for improvement.

Research Workshop

Before the study began, my colleague and I conducted a collaborative discovery session to establish goals and uncover the team's assumptions about careers content.

We also interviewed individual stakeholders to get more context about the challenges the team had encountered.

The target audience started out pretty broad, but we were able to narrow it down to potential specific job seekers:

Young people with little to no job experience (HS-aged or recent graduates)
Experienced workers looking to switch to the energy industry

The content team wanted to learn more about how their primary audience went about finding careers – where they searched, who influenced them, what language they used. They also wanted to test sample content they had written to see if it aligned with what their audience needed.

Workshop Activity in FigJam

Study Design

Recruitment for this project was straightforward; we worked from the company’s contact list of community partners and people interested in their programs. We knew that if this group of people provided negative feedback, it would be a clear indication that the content should be changed.

Study design consisted of two parts:

1. Exploratory Interviews

Open-ended questions so participants could talk about their career journey in their own words. Starting with this segment let us get an unfiltered look at the type of language people used when discussing what they looked for in a career.

2. Content Testing

Sample content on Google Slides with different instructions. To avoid accidentally influencing people's responses, we did not show the content until after the exploratory questions.

Interview Question Sample

Content Readability Sample

Study Findings

1. Relatable Content

Participants were asked to "Highlight what you like most in green, and what you'd like to change or remove in red"
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Participants highlighted the same key phrases, which also aligned with their stated values during the interview portion. As they highlighted, participants talked out loud. saying things like, “Yes! This is true!” or “this isn't that relevant”.

Using this method, we identified the most valuable phrases and added them to a word bank to draw language from.

Participant Quote

“Opportunity to grow your career - if I can work with the best of the best it makes me feel like I am part of something great”

-participant 5

2. Readability

Using a Cloze* test, where participants guess what word will be next in a passage, we found that the majority of the content was over the desired 8th grade reading level. We highlighted the most difficult passages and recommended editing those passages for clarity and simplicity.

*being able to guess what word will be next in a passage is a good way to test reading comprehension. Research suggests that a reader comprehends the content if they guess at least 60% of the blanks correctly (where synonyms count as correct) .

Cloze Scores

3. Clear Call to Action

Well written content is pointless if it's not actionable, so part of the study was designed to test the actionability of the CTA content.

Of the three CTAs, only one aligned with participants’ expectations. Participants confused the second and third CTA for each other, which suggested that the language was too similar and needed to be rewritten.

The recommendation was to use verbs for each heading and replace the word “find” in the third CTA with the word “match” based on people’s assumptions for the word “find”.

Participant Quote

" I wouldn’t know what to expect when I go to “setting goals”. I haven't seen that and I’ve been applying to a few job websites. I genuinely don’t know. "

-participant 3

The Take-away

With the research in hand, the content team was able to make important revisions to the language on the site and improve their overall conversion.

Research doesn’t have to be time-consuming and labor-intensive to be effective. It’s possible to learn valuable information using simple tools on a limited timeframe as long as your research method matches your study objective and you approach the challenge with flexibility.