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NEN is the Dutch Standardisation Institute. NEN brings parties and stakeholders together and ensures that they reach agreements that are recorded in standards and guidelines. They do this in national and/or international standards committees. In addition, NEN stimulates the application and use of standards in practice through training courses and, for example, practical guides. Standards contribute to healthy international cooperation, efficient trade and a sustainable society.
To make these standards accessible to all parties, NEN has an online platform, NEN Connect. It is designed to give professionals, companies and organisations access to all relevant standards and standards content for their specific fields.
NEN sought our help to create a human centred product development process for NEN Connect Next (NCX), the new NEN Connect platform.
The goal was to create a backlog definition and design for NCX based on validation with customers and internal users, leading to a conceptual design that better supports the ideal customer journey.
NEN Connect is one of NEN's services, with a large number of users and downloads. Though the number of users is high, the percentage of active users could be much higher. In conversations with users, we discovered that many are relying on their own, often less convenient, workflow to apply standards.
In collaboration with the NCX team members, we leveraged our expertise in user research, hypothesis-driven design, customer journey mapping, and backlog development. We focused on creating a product concept grounded in validated customer journeys by actively engaging with customers and on we focussed on a well-defined backlog to realise the product concept.
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Workshop with stakeholders
By transforming customer journey research into service blueprints, we made valuable insights tangible for the organisation. This helped engage the organisation in the process and create a shared understanding of the needs of the organisation through a product vision.
We aligned the blueprints with internal goals and technical plans to create the ideal flow. This approach ensured that all stakeholders moved in the same direction and that the product concept was optimally aligned with user needs and organisational objectives.
With the internal alignment we were able to move from customer journeys to a concrete product definition. By focusing on specific design areas, we identified and developed key functionalities into a conceptual design that enhances the user experience. With the service blueprint, this served as the starting point for applying story mapping and creating a list of requirements and a backlog.
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Partnership
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During this project, we applied our Discover & Strategise approach, which uses diverging and converging phases to define the product concept. Each phase focused on specific areas to gather the necessary insights and integrate them into the product vision.
Business Context
NEN had extensive knowledge of the current NEN Connect product and user context. Stakeholder discussions and prior research provided a solid understanding of the current situation and the vision for NCX. This foundation enabled us to align business needs with the product vision and establish a hypothesis-driven setup for user research.
Key insights of this phase included understanding future plans for the product and subscriptions, the numerous features of the product, system and stakeholder collaboration, future standardisation plans, and opportunities for simplifying processes.
User Context
We focused on understanding internal and external users by engaging directly with their customers, rather than relying solely on internal knowledge. We developed hypotheses and selected a high-level customer journey for further exploration (search, find, read, & use). User interviews and opportunity mapping revealed moments to enhance the customer experience. We consolidated these insights into a Service Blueprint, integrating customer and technical flows.
The blueprint helped identify design areas needing further research. During workshops with the NCX team, we evaluated these areas from the user's perspective, informing the conceptual design and product vision.
Product Vision
In this process we aligned customer journey opportunities with internal goals. We developed a product vision and design principles that unified NEN’s objectives with user needs, creating an optimal user experience. Screen designs supported the vision and journey, and we consolidated requirements through story mapping into a backlog, ready for the next step of product realisation.
Thanks to their expertise in strategy, research and concept and design, our partner fresk.digital helped us with a product concept to better understand and support our users and stakeholders. By better guiding them through our system and reducing complexity, we aim to make our standards more accessible and better aligned with their needs and experiences.
Digital Product Manager NEN Connect Next
The world and content of standards are complex. This complexity creates a need for users to have simplicity, clear structures, seamless user flows, and straightforward explanations within the user interface so they can focus on the content. Although the current NEN Connect system is highly valuable and offers many useful applications, users are often unaware of the available options or become overwhelmed by the abundance of possibilities.
With the new product concept, we aim to better support users by guiding them through the system and reducing complexity. We created a work environment that helps them use up-to-date standards in a user-friendly manner, rather than relying on outdated standards from the windowsill.
We do that by reducing noise, guiding users more effectively, and providing explanations at the right moments to help them better understand how NCX can assist them in applying standards. The result is a focused and proactive work environment that provides users with tools to read standards more intuitively, consult them quickly, organise them, receive notifications, and apply different perspectives (tools) to the standards. And it leads to the reduction of search efforts and has a general better alignment with user needs.
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