Establishing a user experience mindset
UX optimization & UX enablement
forwerts & slashwhy
This project was realized within the slashwhy corporate group by partner company forwerts. forwerts is a digitalization and design consultancy focused on UX and CX strategy, service design, and strategy consulting. An interdisciplinary team of designers and strategists successfully brings digital products to fruition, even in complex corporate environments. Together, slashwhy and forwerts offer consulting, design, and development from a single source: from strategy through implementation. forwerts works across industries, with a focus on energy, industrial, technology, healthcare, and finance sectors.
Services
UX Strategy Consulting
User Research
Technologies/Methods
Process Analysis & Optimization
UX Deep Dive Workshop
Wireframing & Prototyping
A/B Testing
Training on the Job
An energy provider on the verge of user-centered thinking
The client is a municipal energy provider that, alongside electricity and gas, covers other areas of regional public services. The collaboration began with UX optimizations of the web presence: landing pages, click funnels, and the main navigation were key touchpoints with end customers, but weren't consistently convincing. On the client's side, the realization grew that its own digital offerings needed a fresh outside perspective. After all, when you work with the same pages every day, you gradually stop noticing certain hurdles for users. What was needed, then, was an expert, unbiased look at weaknesses from the user's perspective.
UX optimizations with an outside perspective
Weaknesses & potential identified in the web presence
Work began with concrete tasks around landing pages, click funnels, and the website's main navigation. Drawing on solid UX expertise and an unbiased outside perspective, forwerts conducted a UX analysis of the key touchpoints, surfacing weaknesses in user guidance that easily go unnoticed in internal teams' day-to-day work. Just as important were the untapped UX opportunities: identifying where users could be better guided and led more effectively toward getting in touch.
From wireframes to tangible quick wins
These findings led to wireframes and concrete recommendations, extending down to the finer points of user guidance and, in some cases, wording, which were then reviewed and refined by the client's marketing team. Much of it could be implemented quickly: revised spacing and a cleaner layout in the content management system made pages feel more compact and cohesive, clearer sequences and sharper wording improved user guidance in the click funnels, and even small adjustments to high-traffic SEA landing pages boosted their impact. The revised click funnels also lay the groundwork for gaining reliable insights into user behavior through future A/B testing.
The outside perspective is highly valuable to clients across many of our UX consulting projects. We see things that have become second nature in internal teams' daily work, and we make them visible.
Matthias Herkle
Senior UX Expert at forwerts
The next step: UX enablement in sales
From operational support to strategic guidance
The work on individual optimizations grew into a larger initiative. Around its sales division, the energy provider had put together a new, interdisciplinary digital team, whose members came from different fields, ranging from development to design to user experience, and accordingly brought different ideas of what good UX looks like. Guiding this team toward a shared, sustainable way of working became the next assignment: a strategic UX consulting and mentoring engagement that followed on from the operational optimizations of the web presence.
A UX deep-dive for a shared understanding
The engagement began with a UX deep-dive workshop that built a common understanding and a shared sense of good user experience among everyone involved. People who had previously seen themselves more as individual specialists were meant to become a team that works toward shared goals, challenges each other, and aligns on results together. This shared foundation was meant to be the basis for team members, despite their different professional perspectives, to speak the same "language" and make user needs the shared benchmark for their work.
Training on the job & a clear approach
The workshop was followed by a longer-term training-on-the-job program: in regular sessions, team members presented their current topics, forwerts challenged them, and guided them toward a reliable approach. At the center was a traceable process: analyzing and understanding requirements, designing and presenting solutions, gathering feedback and incorporating it, through to the final version. Where it helped speed things up, forwerts provided a wireframe foundation that team members could build on themselves and use to internalize the approach for future work.
The key was shaping a highly diverse group of people from different disciplines into a team with a shared view of user experience. Only then could the methodology and approach truly take hold.
Matthias Herkle
Senior UX Expert at forwerts
Achievements & Outcome
User-centered thinking firmly established
User guidance improved across the web presence: Navigation, landing pages, and click funnels were streamlined and made clearer, making it easier for prospects to get in touch with the company.
Shared UX understanding created: The UX deep-dive established a common understanding and shared language for user experience across the team's varied professional backgrounds.
Consistent approach established: A clear, traceable process from analysis to final solution gives the team direction and confidence, and boosts productivity on UX-related work.
Quality of results improved: Both the team and the client confirmed that working methods and output have noticeably gained in quality.
UX competence sustainably embedded: The team increasingly works independently using the methodology it has learned, rather than remaining permanently dependent on external support.
Data-driven optimization set up for the future: The newly structured click funnels can be refined through targeted A/B testing once the client's analytics processes are in place.
FAQ
UX optimization refers to the targeted improvement of the user experience of a digital application, such as a website, portal, or click funnel. It involves analyzing user guidance, structure, clarity, and the points where users drop off. An expert outside perspective helps surface weaknesses that internal teams barely notice in their day-to-day work anymore. These insights often lead to quick improvements that have a noticeable impact with relatively little effort.
UX strategy consulting helps companies understand user experience not as a one-off measure, but as an ongoing orientation. Rather than just designing individual interfaces, it addresses how digital products and processes can be consistently aligned with user needs, and how a company builds the capabilities and ways of working needed to get there. In doing so, it connects the user perspective, business goals, and the way teams collaborate.
A UX mindset describes the habit of consistently thinking from the user's perspective in every decision. Rather than focusing on internal structures or technical feasibility, the focus is on what the people using an application actually need. This mindset is especially valuable when people from different professional backgrounds work together, since it gives them a shared standard and a common language.
UX enablement refers to the approach of not just delivering finished results to a team, but empowering it to shape good user experience on its own going forward. Rather than one-off delivery, the focus is on building understanding, methodology, a shared way of working, and above all a user-centered mindset. The goal is for the team to become self-sufficient and less permanently dependent on external support.
A UX deep-dive workshop is an intensive format in which a team immerses itself deeply in a specific UX question over a short period, for example a user group, a product, or building a shared understanding of UX. Depending on the goal, it can be used to test assumptions, sharpen understanding of user needs, or establish a common foundation for further work. It's especially useful when people from different disciplines come together, as it helps bring differing ideas of good UX onto the same page.
A click funnel is a guided sequence of consecutive steps that users go through on a website to reach a specific goal. Unlike a pure ordering journey, it doesn't necessarily end in a purchase: often, the aim is to guide prospects, with the right information along the way, toward getting in touch or submitting an inquiry. How well a click funnel works shows up in the sequence of steps, the input fields required, and the drop-off between individual steps.
Training on the job means learning directly within day-to-day work, rather than in a separate training session. In a UX context, this means team members bring their real tasks and work through them together with an experienced mentor. The advantage: what's learned is immediately applicable and takes root in practice, because it's practiced on real tasks rather than hypothetical examples.
A wireframe is a simplified, typically unstyled draft of a page or flow that shows the structure and arrangement of elements before colors and final design are added. Wireframes help make ideas visible and discussable early on, while also serving as a foundation that lets a team move forward faster, without starting from scratch at every step.
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