Impact Award Finalists: Three Teams Turning Evidence Into Real Outcomes

The Impact Award is for teams whose evidence directly drove real outcomes, including user adoption, retention, and conversion. This year’s final three tell three very different but equally strong stories: 

• All human & Power NI, for redesigning Help & Support to drive digital self-serve
• De Gruyter Brill, for unifying two academic publishing platforms into one clearer experience
• LiveEO, for helping utility teams make smarter vegetation management decisions and reduce outages

What connects these three case studies is that each team used evidence to make clear decisions, and those decisions led to measurable change. One reduced pressure on customer support. One improved confidence in a complex purchase journey. And one helped prevent real-world outages by giving teams clearer risk signals.

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All human & Power NI

This case study comes from All human’s redesign of Power NI’s Help & Support experience. Power NI’s Help & Support area was getting around 21,000 visits a month, but the experience was pushing too many customers towards the most expensive support channel: calling. Customers were coming to the website to complete high-intent tasks, such as moving home, switching provider, or submitting meter readings. But instead of finding the right online journey, many were ending up on the Contact page.

The team could see that the navigation was organised around internal categories, not customer intent. Important self-serve tasks were buried, and the Contact page mixed emergencies, sales, and service queries in a way that made it harder for people to find the right path.

To understand the issue properly, the team used three evidence sources: heuristic analysis, tree testing, and analytics plus call data. Tree testing showed that only 59% of users could find what they were looking for, while 20.6% ended up on the Contact page. Analytics also showed that users who clicked the phone number were 7x more likely to exit the site.

That evidence helped the team avoid a complete redesign of the website. Instead, they focused on the journeys that were creating the highest call volumes and made those tasks easier to find. They made self-serve options easier to find, lowering the visual priority of contact routes, and added better tracking so they could understand what users did next. The result was a major shift from calling the company towards self-serving. An increase of 138% of self-serve logins, Contact Us submissions dropped by 29%, and phone clicks dropped by 14%.

De Gruyter Brill

After the merger of De Gruyter and Brill, two academic publishing platforms needed to become one. The challenge they faced was that researchers, students, and librarians were dealing with inconsistent navigation, unclear access status, and a checkout flow that created too much friction. The platform needed to feel like one coherent experience without losing institutional access or weakening trust.

The team used three main methods for their research: moderated usability testing, analytics analysis, and stakeholder interviews and workshops. Across three rounds of moderated usability testing with 75 participants, the team found several points of friction. One important insight was that hover-triggered menus were causing mistakes, so they moved to click-triggered navigation. Analytics helped identify where users were dropping off, while stakeholder workshops with Editorial, Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing helped the team understand content priorities and business constraints.

After implementing the changes, the results showed movement across the success criteria. Checkout drop-off fell by 21%, homepage engagement rose by 32%, and views and engagement on subject landing pages increased by 15%. Just as importantly, the redesign helped create a more unified experience for a global academic audience.

LiveEO

LiveEO’s Treeline product was built for vegetation managers who need to prevent outages before they happen. When vegetation is not managed in time, power lines can fail, which can lead to outages, safety risks, wildfire risk, and major costs for utility providers and communities. Before the redesign, data was spread across different layers and users had to manually compare static snapshots, switch between systems, and rely heavily on experience to decide which lines needed attention first. The goal was to move teams from fixed-cycle planning to insight-led planning, where risk, urgency, and context could be understood in one place.

LiveEO ran continuous research across North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan. They combined interviews, usability testing with early concepts and AI-based prototypes, and direct field observation. Seeing vegetation managers in their real working environment showed how much they were relying on workarounds, including multiple phones, printed maps, to-do lists, and local knowledge.

The redesign brought risk, urgency, and workload into one clearer view, helping vegetation managers see which lines needed attention first. This meant teams could move away from fixed-cycle planning and make decisions based on actual risk. Over 12 to 18 months, customers saw a 40% reduction in outages, alongside cost-per-mile improvements.

Why these three matter

These three finalists show different kinds of impact while having the same pattern. Each team used evidence to make sharper decisions, avoided guesswork, and tied their work to a measurable outcome.

They also show that impact does not always look the same. Sometimes it is more self-serve completions, sometimes it is lower checkout drop-off, and sometimes it is fewer outages. But in every case, the research led to a change that mattered.

The public vote counts for 25% of the final score, and now it’s over to you. The winners will be announced live on stage at UXDX EMEA 2026 in Berlin, where we’ll celebrate the teams turning evidence, research, and design into measurable outcomes.

Voting closes in 7 days, so make sure your vote is counted. Vote here: Take me to the LinkedIn Poll

*Get your tickets here to see the winners live: https://uxdx.com/berlin/2026/tickets/