Focussing on user’s needs means web inspiration can come from anywhere

Inspiration can come from unexpected sources.

Take this article for example. It’s about websites but it was inspired by camping mattress repairs. The LLM in my head had some strange training materials. Bear with me though, it will all make sense. 

If you’ve been camping this summer, there’s a reasonable chance that you’ve woken up with a painful achy sensation due to a deflated mattress, better known as “Overnight matt deflation syndrome” or OMDS. You’re not alone. Punctured mattresses present a huge issue for companies like Decathlon as well as their users. They offer repair services and fixing leaky air mattresses is apparently one of their most popular requests. The fix is simple – find the hole and apply a patch. Finding the hole can be tricky and time consuming though. The time factor is the issue here because it makes repairing the mattress uneconomical. 

So given the scale of issue, they broke down the problem to its definitive part – identifying where the leak was. They approached the challenge laterally and thought about what other industries might have experienced this sort of problem and had already solved it. This led them to an unlikely place. The fossil gas industry. 

Gas leaks are a huge problem for the fossil fuel industry. They can be costly and hard to find, just like they are for, err, camping mattresses. So they developed a solution. Using a special camera and microphone, they check pipelines for leaks. The microphone identifies the sound of leaks (pfft) and pinpoints it on the camera screen. Engineers can then tag the pipeline and make a repair. 

Decathlon found that this technology can be used for their repairs too. It slashed the time required to patch a leak to a handful of minutes and made the repair offering viable again. When it’s fully rolled out it has the potential to massively reduce waste and increase customer satisfaction. 

The genius of this idea from Decathlon is not the use of technology to solve a problem, it’s in identifying the core of the problem you’re trying to solve. If you focus too hard on the overall problem you can end up missing potential solutions from other, unexpected places. If you remove the product, client, sector or industry from the equation and just try to solve the core user/customer problem, inspiration can come from anywhere. 

This is something Wholegrain practices across our projects and clients. Our user centric, Humane Web approach helps us focus on the need, not the problem at hand. We’re sector agnostic, which is a fancy way of saying that if a solution from one sector can work for another, we’ll use it. A simple example might be using e-commerce inspired product filters to make it easier to find articles on a large media site. 

We’re not just looking for features though, it’s about the shared needs of projects too. Two of our most recent site builds, EACTs and UITP are great examples. On the face of it, a site for Cardiothoracic surgeons should have little in common with one for Public Transport professionals. But when you look at the needs of the two sets of users, you find much more common ground.

Both sites are for Membership organisations, so they need to provide relevant information about things like events, industry news and best practices. We can take tried and tested ways of sharing news for heart surgeons and apply them for transport planners. The lessons from a transport summit site can improve the user experience for medical professional conference sites. 

This user centric approach helps us share solutions and experience for clients who have similar goals but are at different stages in their journeys too. Environment Bank and Good Energy are two of our clients with sustainability at the core of their operations. They’re both on a mission to make the UK greener, cleaner and more bio diverse but work in very different sectors. Despite this, some of their core user problems are very similar and solutions can be shared between the sites. 

Part of their challenge is helping UK businesses to transition to working in ways that decarbonise and restore natural habitats, to improve the local and national environment. Environment Bank does this by helping developers meet their legal bio-diversity commitments through consultation and habitat banks. Good Energy is helping decarbonise the energy sector through renewable energy provision and support for lower carbon technologies like EVs and heat pumps. 

A big challenge for both companies comes down to education, information and persuasion. The design techniques, user experiences and features that Good Energy have been using can help to inform what users need for an organisation like Environment Bank, just like with EACTs and UITP. Users are looking for solutions to environmental problems and want clear, easy to digest information to help them make positive changes. 

For an organisation like Environment Bank their offering is less well known than the renewables that Good Energy offers. But Good Energy has also been in the position of offering different ways of doing things that required reassurance and confidence to persuade users. We can apply the lessons from more mature organisations to organisations who are earlier in their development. No matter what stage they are at, these users for these organisations’ sites have similar needs. Focussing on the needs means more solutions.

When you look at our portfolio of sites and clients, you’ll see a diverse set of organisations, sectors and industries. The thing they share is that they want to work with a sustainably minded agency to further their positive goals. This diversity means that we’ve got a huge breadth of experience meeting a wide range of user requirements. Our sites are robust, humane, digitally sustainable, performant, but most importantly user-centric. After all it’s their problems we need a site to solve, no matter what they are. 

If you’ve got a web project you’d like to discuss, reach out to Bailey to find out how this approach could work for you. 

You’ll find more insights into our working practices in this range of articles on our Humane Web approach.