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16 case study examples (+ 3 templates to make your own)

Hero image with an icon representing a case study

I like to think of case studies as a business's version of a resume. It highlights what the business can do, lends credibility to its offer, and contains only the positive bullet points that paint it in the best light possible.

Imagine if the guy running your favorite taco truck followed you home so that he could "really dig into how that burrito changed your life." I see the value in the practice. People naturally prefer a tried-and-true burrito just as they prefer tried-and-true products or services.

To help you showcase your success and flesh out your burrito questionnaire, I've put together some case study examples and key takeaways.

What is a case study?

A case study is an in-depth analysis of how your business, product, or service has helped past clients. It can be a document, a webpage, or a slide deck that showcases measurable, real-life results.

For example, if you're a SaaS company, you can analyze your customers' results after a few months of using your product to measure its effectiveness. You can then turn this analysis into a case study that further proves to potential customers what your product can do and how it can help them overcome their challenges.

It changes the narrative from "I promise that we can do X and Y for you" to "Here's what we've done for businesses like yours, and we can do it for you, too."

16 case study examples 

While most case studies follow the same structure, quite a few try to break the mold and create something unique. Some businesses lean heavily on design and presentation, while others pursue a detailed, stat-oriented approach. Some businesses try to mix both.

There's no set formula to follow, but I've found that the best case studies utilize impactful design to engage readers and leverage statistics and case details to drive the point home. A case study typically highlights the companies, the challenges, the solution, and the results. The examples below will help inspire you to do it, too.

1. .css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class]{all:unset;box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-text-fill-color:currentColor;cursor:pointer;}.css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class]{all:unset;box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;cursor:pointer;-webkit-transition:all 300ms ease-in-out;transition:all 300ms ease-in-out;outline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-fill-color:currentColor;outline:1px solid transparent;}.css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class][data-color='ocean']{color:#3d4592;}.css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class][data-color='ocean']:hover{color:#2b2358;}.css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class][data-color='ocean']:focus{color:#3d4592;outline-color:#3d4592;}.css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class][data-color='white']{color:#fffdf9;}.css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class][data-color='white']:hover{color:#a8a5a0;}.css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class][data-color='white']:focus{color:#fffdf9;outline-color:#fffdf9;}.css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class][data-color='primary']{color:#3d4592;}.css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class][data-color='primary']:hover{color:#2b2358;}.css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class][data-color='primary']:focus{color:#3d4592;outline-color:#3d4592;}.css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class][data-color='secondary']{color:#fffdf9;}.css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class][data-color='secondary']:hover{color:#a8a5a0;}.css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class][data-color='secondary']:focus{color:#fffdf9;outline-color:#fffdf9;}.css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class][data-weight='inherit']{font-weight:inherit;}.css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class][data-weight='normal']{font-weight:400;}.css-1l9i3yq-Link[class][class][class][class][class][data-weight='bold']{font-weight:700;} Volcanica Coffee and AdRoll

On top of a background of coffee beans, a block of text with percentage growth statistics for how AdRoll nitro-fueled Volcanica coffee.

People love a good farm-to-table coffee story, and boy am I one of them. But I've shared this case study with you for more reasons than my love of coffee. I enjoyed this study because it was written as though it was a letter.

In this case study, the founder of Volcanica Coffee talks about the journey from founding the company to personally struggling with learning and applying digital marketing to finding and enlisting AdRoll's services.

It felt more authentic, less about AdRoll showcasing their worth and more like a testimonial from a grateful and appreciative client. After the story, the case study wraps up with successes, milestones, and achievements. Note that quite a few percentages are prominently displayed at the top, providing supporting evidence that backs up an inspiring story.

Takeaway: Highlight your goals and measurable results to draw the reader in and provide concise, easily digestible information.

2. Taylor Guitars and Airtable

Screenshot of the Taylor Guitars and Airtable case study, with the title: Taylor Guitars brings more music into the world with Airtable

This Airtable case study on Taylor Guitars comes as close as one can to an optimal structure. It features a video that represents the artistic nature of the client, highlighting key achievements and dissecting each element of Airtable's influence.

It also supplements each section with a testimonial or quote from the client, using their insights as a catalyst for the case study's narrative. For example, the case study quotes the social media manager and project manager's insights regarding team-wide communication and access before explaining in greater detail.

Takeaway: Highlight pain points your business solves for its client, and explore that influence in greater detail.

3. EndeavourX and Figma

Screenshot of the Endeavour and Figma case study, showing a bulleted list about why EndeavourX chose Figma followed by an image of EndeavourX's workspace on Figma

My favorite part of Figma's case study is highlighting why EndeavourX chose its solution. You'll notice an entire section on what Figma does for teams and then specifically for EndeavourX.

It also places a heavy emphasis on numbers and stats. The study, as brief as it is, still manages to pack in a lot of compelling statistics about what's possible with Figma.

Takeaway: Showcase the "how" and "why" of your product's differentiators and how they benefit your customers.

4. ActiveCampaign and Zapier

Screenshot of Zapier's case study with ActiveCampaign, showing three data visualizations on purple backgrounds

Zapier's case study leans heavily on design, using graphics to present statistics and goals in a manner that not only remains consistent with the branding but also actively pushes it forward, drawing users' eyes to the information most important to them. 

The graphics, emphasis on branding elements, and cause/effect style tell the story without requiring long, drawn-out copy that risks boring readers. Instead, the cause and effect are concisely portrayed alongside the client company's information for a brief and easily scannable case study.

Takeaway: Lean on design to call attention to the most important elements of your case study, and make sure it stays consistent with your branding.

5. Ironclad and OpenAI

Screenshot of a video from the Ironclad and OpenAI case study showing the Ironclad AI Assist feature

In true OpenAI fashion, this case study is a block of text. There's a distinct lack of imagery, but the study features a narrated video walking readers through the product.

The lack of imagery and color may not be the most inviting, but utilizing video format is commendable. It helps thoroughly communicate how OpenAI supported Ironclad in a way that allows the user to sit back, relax, listen, and be impressed. 

Takeaway: Get creative with the media you implement in your case study. Videos can be a very powerful addition when a case study requires more detailed storytelling.

6. Shopify and GitHub

Screenshot of the Shopify and GitHub case study, with the title "Shopify keeps pushing ecommerce forward with help from GitHub tools," followed by a photo of a plant and a Shopify bag on a table on a dark background

GitHub's case study on Shopify is a light read. It addresses client pain points and discusses the different aspects its product considers and improves for clients. It touches on workflow issues, internal systems, automation, and security. It does a great job of representing what one company can do with GitHub.

To drive the point home, the case study features colorful quote callouts from the Shopify team, sharing their insights and perspectives on the partnership, the key issues, and how they were addressed.

Takeaway: Leverage quotes to boost the authoritativeness and trustworthiness of your case study. 

7 . Audible and Contentful

Screenshot of the Audible and Contentful case study showing images of titles on Audible

Contentful's case study on Audible features almost every element a case study should. It includes not one but two videos and clearly outlines the challenge, solution, and outcome before diving deeper into what Contentful did for Audible. The language is simple, and the writing is heavy with quotes and personal insights.

This case study is a uniquely original experience. The fact that the companies in question are perhaps two of the most creative brands out there may be the reason. I expected nothing short of a detailed analysis, a compelling story, and video content. 

Takeaway: Inject some brand voice into the case study, and create assets that tell the story for you.

8 . Zoom and Asana

Screenshot of Zoom and Asana's case study on a navy blue background and an image of someone sitting on a Zoom call at a desk with the title "Zoom saves 133 work weeks per year with Asana"

Asana's case study on Zoom is longer than the average piece and features detailed data on Zoom's growth since 2020. Instead of relying on imagery and graphics, it features several quotes and testimonials. 

It's designed to be direct, informative, and promotional. At some point, the case study reads more like a feature list. There were a few sections that felt a tad too promotional for my liking, but to each their own burrito.

Takeaway: Maintain a balance between promotional and informative. You want to showcase the high-level goals your product helped achieve without losing the reader.

9 . Hickies and Mailchimp

Screenshot of the Hickies and Mailchimp case study with the title in a fun orange font, followed by a paragraph of text and a photo of a couple sitting on a couch looking at each other and smiling

I've always been a fan of Mailchimp's comic-like branding, and this case study does an excellent job of sticking to their tradition of making information easy to understand, casual, and inviting.

It features a short video that briefly covers Hickies as a company and Mailchimp's efforts to serve its needs for customer relationships and education processes. Overall, this case study is a concise overview of the partnership that manages to convey success data and tell a story at the same time. What sets it apart is that it does so in a uniquely colorful and brand-consistent manner.

Takeaway: Be concise to provide as much value in as little text as possible.

10. NVIDIA and Workday

Screenshot of NVIDIA and Workday's case study with a photo of a group of people standing around a tall desk and smiling and the title "NVIDIA hires game changers"

The gaming industry is notoriously difficult to recruit for, as it requires a very specific set of skills and experience. This case study focuses on how Workday was able to help fill that recruitment gap for NVIDIA, one of the biggest names in the gaming world.

Though it doesn't feature videos or graphics, this case study stood out to me in how it structures information like "key products used" to give readers insight into which tools helped achieve these results.

Takeaway: If your company offers multiple products or services, outline exactly which ones were involved in your case study, so readers can assess each tool.

11. KFC and Contentful

Screenshot of KFC and Contentful's case study showing the outcome of the study, showing two stats: 43% increase in YoY digital sales and 50%+ increase in AU digital sales YoY

I'm personally not a big KFC fan, but that's only because I refuse to eat out of a bucket. My aversion to the bucket format aside, Contentful follows its consistent case study format in this one, outlining challenges, solutions, and outcomes before diving into the nitty-gritty details of the project.

Say what you will about KFC, but their primary product (chicken) does present a unique opportunity for wordplay like "Continuing to march to the beat of a digital-first drum(stick)" or "Delivering deep-fried goodness to every channel."

Takeaway: Inject humor into your case study if there's room for it and if it fits your brand. 

12. Intuit and Twilio

Screenshot of the Intuit and Twilio case study on a dark background with three small, light green icons illustrating three important data points

Twilio does an excellent job of delivering achievements at the very beginning of the case study and going into detail in this two-minute read. While there aren't many graphics, the way quotes from the Intuit team are implemented adds a certain flair to the study and breaks up the sections nicely.

It's simple, concise, and manages to fit a lot of information in easily digestible sections.

Takeaway: Make sure each section is long enough to inform but brief enough to avoid boring readers. Break down information for each section, and don't go into so much detail that you lose the reader halfway through.

13. Spotify and Salesforce

Screenshot of Spotify and Salesforce's case study showing a still of a video with the title "Automation keeps Spotify's ad business growing year over year"

Salesforce created a video that accurately summarizes the key points of the case study. Beyond that, the page itself is very light on content, and sections are as short as one paragraph.

I especially like how information is broken down into "What you need to know," "Why it matters," and "What the difference looks like." I'm not ashamed of being spoon-fed information. When it's structured so well and so simply, it makes for an entertaining read.

Takeaway: Invest in videos that capture and promote your partnership with your case study subject. Video content plays a promotional role that extends beyond the case study in social media and marketing initiatives .

14. Benchling and Airtable

Screenshot of the Benchling and Airtable case study with the title: How Benchling achieves scientific breakthroughs via efficiency

Benchling is an impressive entity in its own right. Biotech R&D and health care nuances go right over my head. But the research and digging I've been doing in the name of these burritos (case studies) revealed that these products are immensely complex. 

And that's precisely why this case study deserves a read—it succeeds at explaining a complex project that readers outside the industry wouldn't know much about.

Takeaway: Simplify complex information, and walk readers through the company's operations and how your business helped streamline them.

15. Chipotle and Hubble

Screenshot of the Chipotle and Hubble case study with the title "Mexican food chain replaces Discoverer with Hubble and sees major efficiency improvements," followed by a photo of the outside of a Chipotle restaurant

The concision of this case study is refreshing. It features two sections—the challenge and the solution—all in 316 words. This goes to show that your case study doesn't necessarily need to be a four-figure investment with video shoots and studio time. 

Sometimes, the message is simple and short enough to convey in a handful of paragraphs.

Takeaway: Consider what you should include instead of what you can include. Assess the time, resources, and effort you're able and willing to invest in a case study, and choose which elements you want to include from there.

16. Hudl and Zapier

Screenshot of Hudl and Zapier's case study, showing data visualizations at the bottom, two photos of people playing sports on the top right , and a quote from the Hudl team on the topleft

I may be biased, but I'm a big fan of seeing metrics and achievements represented in branded graphics. It can be a jarring experience to navigate a website, then visit a case study page and feel as though you've gone to a completely different website.

The Zapier format provides nuggets of high-level insights, milestones, and achievements, as well as the challenge, solution, and results. My favorite part of this case study is how it's supplemented with a blog post detailing how Hudl uses Zapier automation to build a seamless user experience.

The case study is essentially the summary, and the blog article is the detailed analysis that provides context beyond X achievement or Y goal.

Takeaway: Keep your case study concise and informative. Create other resources to provide context under your blog, media or press, and product pages.

3 case study templates

Now that you've had your fill of case studies (if that's possible), I've got just what you need: an infinite number of case studies, which you can create yourself with these case study templates.

Case study template 1

Screenshot of Zapier's first case study template, with the title and three spots for data callouts at the top on a light peach-colored background, followed by a place to write the main success of the case study on a dark green background

If you've got a quick hit of stats you want to show off, try this template. The opening section gives space for a short summary and three visually appealing stats you can highlight, followed by a headline and body where you can break the case study down more thoroughly. This one's pretty simple, with only sections for solutions and results, but you can easily continue the formatting to add more sections as needed.

Case study template 2

Screenshot of Zapier's second case study template, with the title, objectives, and overview on a dark blue background with an orange strip in the middle with a place to write the main success of the case study

For a case study template with a little more detail, use this one. Opening with a striking cover page for a quick overview, this one goes on to include context, stakeholders, challenges, multiple quote callouts, and quick-hit stats. 

Case study template 3

Screenshot of Zapier's third case study template, with the places for title, objectives, and about the business on a dark green background followed by three spots for data callouts in orange boxes

Whether you want a little structural variation or just like a nice dark green, this template has similar components to the last template but is designed to help tell a story. Move from the client overview through a description of your company before getting to the details of how you fixed said company's problems.

Tips for writing a case study

Examples are all well and good, but you don't learn how to make a burrito just by watching tutorials on YouTube without knowing what any of the ingredients are. You could , but it probably wouldn't be all that good.

Writing a good case study comes down to a mix of creativity, branding, and the capacity to invest in the project. With those details in mind, here are some case study tips to follow:

Have an objective: Define your objective by identifying the challenge, solution, and results. Assess your work with the client and focus on the most prominent wins. You're speaking to multiple businesses and industries through the case study, so make sure you know what you want to say to them.

Focus on persuasive data: Growth percentages and measurable results are your best friends. Extract your most compelling data and highlight it in your case study.

Use eye-grabbing graphics: Branded design goes a long way in accurately representing your brand and retaining readers as they review the study. Leverage unique and eye-catching graphics to keep readers engaged. 

Simplify data presentation: Some industries are more complex than others, and sometimes, data can be difficult to understand at a glance. Make sure you present your data in the simplest way possible. Make it concise, informative, and easy to understand.

Use automation to drive results for your case study

A case study example is a source of inspiration you can leverage to determine how to best position your brand's work. Find your unique angle, and refine it over time to help your business stand out. Ask anyone: the best burrito in town doesn't just appear at the number one spot. They find their angle (usually the house sauce) and leverage it to stand out.

In fact, with the right technology, it can be refined to work better . Explore how Zapier's automation features can help drive results for your case study by making your case study a part of a developed workflow that creates a user journey through your website, your case studies, and into the pipeline.

Case study FAQ

Got your case study template? Great—it's time to gather the team for an awkward semi-vague data collection task. While you do that, here are some case study quick answers for you to skim through while you contemplate what to call your team meeting.

What is an example of a case study?

An example of a case study is when a software company analyzes its results from a client project and creates a webpage, presentation, or document that focuses on high-level results, challenges, and solutions in an attempt to showcase effectiveness and promote the software.

How do you write a case study?

To write a good case study, you should have an objective, identify persuasive and compelling data, leverage graphics, and simplify data. Case studies typically include an analysis of the challenge, solution, and results of the partnership.

What is the format of a case study?

While case studies don't have a set format, they're often portrayed as reports or essays that inform readers about the partnership and its results. 

Related reading:

How Hudl uses automation to create a seamless user experience

How to make your case studies high-stakes—and why it matters

How experts write case studies that convert, not bore

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Hachem Ramki

Hachem is a writer and digital marketer from Montreal. After graduating with a degree in English, Hachem spent seven years traveling around the world before moving to Canada. When he's not writing, he enjoys Basketball, Dungeons and Dragons, and playing music for friends and family.

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Writing A Case Study

Case Study Examples

Barbara P

Brilliant Case Study Examples and Templates For Your Help

15 min read

Published on: Jun 26, 2019

Last updated on: Nov 29, 2023

Case Study Examples

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A Complete Case Study Writing Guide With Examples

Simple Case Study Format for Students to Follow

Understand the Types of Case Study Here

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It’s no surprise that writing a case study is one of the most challenging academic tasks for students. You’re definitely not alone here!

Most people don't realize that there are specific guidelines to follow when writing a case study. If you don't know where to start, it's easy to get overwhelmed and give up before you even begin.

Don't worry! Let us help you out!

We've collected over 25 free case study examples with solutions just for you. These samples with solutions will help you win over your panel and score high marks on your case studies.

So, what are you waiting for? Let's dive in and learn the secrets to writing a successful case study.

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An Overview of Case Studies

A case study is a research method used to study a particular individual, group, or situation in depth. It involves analyzing and interpreting data from a variety of sources to gain insight into the subject being studied. 

Case studies are often used in psychology, business, and education to explore complicated problems and find solutions. They usually have detailed descriptions of the subject, background info, and an analysis of the main issues.

The goal of a case study is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the subject. Typically, case studies can be divided into three parts, challenges, solutions, and results. 

Here is a case study sample PDF so you can have a clearer understanding of what a case study actually is:

Case Study Sample PDF

How to Write a Case Study Examples

Learn how to write a case study with the help of our comprehensive case study guide.

Case Study Examples for Students

Quite often, students are asked to present case studies in their academic journeys. The reason instructors assign case studies is for students to sharpen their critical analysis skills, understand how companies make profits, etc.

Below are some case study examples in research, suitable for students:

Case Study Example in Software Engineering

Qualitative Research Case Study Sample

Software Quality Assurance Case Study

Social Work Case Study Example

Ethical Case Study

Case Study Example PDF

These examples can guide you on how to structure and format your own case studies.

Struggling with formatting your case study? Check this case study format guide and perfect your document’s structure today.

Business Case Study Examples

A business case study examines a business’s specific challenge or goal and how it should be solved. Business case studies usually focus on several details related to the initial challenge and proposed solution. 

To help you out, here are some samples so you can create case studies that are related to businesses: 

Here are some more business case study examples:

Business Case Studies PDF

Business Case Studies Example

Typically, a business case study discovers one of your customer's stories and how you solved a problem for them. It allows your prospects to see how your solutions address their needs. 

Medical Case Study Examples

Medical case studies are an essential part of medical education. They help students to understand how to diagnose and treat patients. 

Here are some medical case study examples to help you.

Medical Case Study Example

Nursing Case Study Example

Want to understand the various types of case studies? Check out our types of case study blog to select the perfect type.

Psychology Case Study Examples 

Case studies are a great way of investigating individuals with psychological abnormalities. This is why it is a very common assignment in psychology courses. 

By examining all the aspects of your subject’s life, you discover the possible causes of exhibiting such behavior. 

For your help, here are some interesting psychology case study examples:

Psychology Case Study Example

Mental Health Case Study Example

Sales Case Study Examples

Case studies are important tools for sales teams’ performance improvement. By examining sales successes, teams can gain insights into effective strategies and create action plans to employ similar tactics.

By researching case studies of successful sales campaigns, sales teams can more accurately identify challenges and develop solutions.

Sales Case Study Example

Interview Case Study Examples

Interview case studies provide businesses with invaluable information. This data allows them to make informed decisions related to certain markets or subjects.

Interview Case Study Example

Marketing Case Study Examples

Marketing case studies are real-life stories that showcase how a business solves a problem. They typically discuss how a business achieves a goal using a specific marketing strategy or tactic.

They typically describe a challenge faced by a business, the solution implemented, and the results achieved.

This is a short sample marketing case study for you to get an idea of what an actual marketing case study looks like.

 Here are some more popular marketing studies that show how companies use case studies as a means of marketing and promotion:

“Chevrolet Discover the Unexpected” by Carol H. Williams

This case study explores Chevrolet's “ DTU Journalism Fellows ” program. The case study uses the initials “DTU” to generate interest and encourage readers to learn more. 

Multiple types of media, such as images and videos, are used to explain the challenges faced. The case study concludes with an overview of the achievements that were met.

Key points from the case study include:

  • Using a well-known brand name in the title can create interest.
  • Combining different media types, such as headings, images, and videos, can help engage readers and make the content more memorable.
  • Providing a summary of the key achievements at the end of the case study can help readers better understand the project's impact.

“The Met” by Fantasy

“ The Met ” by Fantasy is a fictional redesign of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, created by the design studio Fantasy. The case study clearly and simply showcases the museum's website redesign.

The Met emphasizes the website’s features and interface by showcasing each section of the interface individually, allowing the readers to concentrate on the significant elements.

For those who prefer text, each feature includes an objective description. The case study also includes a “Contact Us” call-to-action at the bottom of the page, inviting visitors to contact the company.

Key points from this “The Met” include:

  • Keeping the case study simple and clean can help readers focus on the most important aspects.
  • Presenting the features and solutions with a visual showcase can be more effective than writing a lot of text.
  • Including a clear call-to-action at the end of the case study can encourage visitors to contact the company for more information.

“Better Experiences for All” by Herman Miller

Herman Miller's minimalist approach to furniture design translates to their case study, “ Better Experiences for All ”, for a Dubai hospital. The page features a captivating video with closed-captioning and expandable text for accessibility.

The case study presents a wealth of information in a concise format, enabling users to grasp the complexities of the strategy with ease. It concludes with a client testimonial and a list of furniture items purchased from the brand.

Key points from the “Better Experiences” include:

  • Make sure your case study is user-friendly by including accessibility features like closed captioning and expandable text.
  • Include a list of products that were used in the project to guide potential customers.

“NetApp” by Evisort 

Evisort's case study on “ NetApp ” stands out for its informative and compelling approach. The study begins with a client-centric overview of NetApp, strategically directing attention to the client rather than the company or team involved.

The case study incorporates client quotes and explores NetApp’s challenges during COVID-19. Evisort showcases its value as a client partner by showing how its services supported NetApp through difficult times. 

  • Provide an overview of the company in the client’s words, and put focus on the customer. 
  • Highlight how your services can help clients during challenging times.
  • Make your case study accessible by providing it in various formats.

“Red Sox Season Campaign,” by CTP Boston

The “ Red Sox Season Campaign ” showcases a perfect blend of different media, such as video, text, and images. Upon visiting the page, the video plays automatically, there are videos of Red Sox players, their images, and print ads that can be enlarged with a click.

The page features an intuitive design and invites viewers to appreciate CTP's well-rounded campaign for Boston's beloved baseball team. There’s also a CTA that prompts viewers to learn how CTP can create a similar campaign for their brand.

Some key points to take away from the “Red Sox Season Campaign”: 

  • Including a variety of media such as video, images, and text can make your case study more engaging and compelling.
  • Include a call-to-action at the end of your study that encourages viewers to take the next step towards becoming a customer or prospect.

“Airbnb + Zendesk” by Zendesk

The case study by Zendesk, titled “ Airbnb + Zendesk : Building a powerful solution together,” showcases a true partnership between Airbnb and Zendesk. 

The article begins with an intriguing opening statement, “Halfway around the globe is a place to stay with your name on it. At least for a weekend,” and uses stunning images of beautiful Airbnb locations to captivate readers.

Instead of solely highlighting Zendesk's product, the case study is crafted to tell a good story and highlight Airbnb's service in detail. This strategy makes the case study more authentic and relatable.

Some key points to take away from this case study are:

  • Use client's offerings' images rather than just screenshots of your own product or service.
  • To begin the case study, it is recommended to include a distinct CTA. For instance, Zendesk presents two alternatives, namely to initiate a trial or seek a solution.

“Influencer Marketing” by Trend and WarbyParker

The case study "Influencer Marketing" by Trend and Warby Parker highlights the potential of influencer content marketing, even when working with a limited budget. 

The “Wearing Warby” campaign involved influencers wearing Warby Parker glasses during their daily activities, providing a glimpse of the brand's products in use. 

This strategy enhanced the brand's relatability with influencers' followers. While not detailing specific tactics, the case study effectively illustrates the impact of third-person case studies in showcasing campaign results.

Key points to take away from this case study are:

  • Influencer marketing can be effective even with a limited budget.
  • Showcasing products being used in everyday life can make a brand more approachable and relatable.
  • Third-person case studies can be useful in highlighting the success of a campaign.

Marketing Case Study Example

Marketing Case Study Template

Now that you have read multiple case study examples, hop on to our tips.

Tips to Write a Good Case Study

Here are some note-worthy tips to craft a winning case study 

  • Define the purpose of the case study This will help you to focus on the most important aspects of the case. The case study objective helps to ensure that your finished product is concise and to the point.
  • Choose a real-life example. One of the best ways to write a successful case study is to choose a real-life example. This will give your readers a chance to see how the concepts apply in a real-world setting.
  • Keep it brief. This means that you should only include information that is directly relevant to your topic and avoid adding unnecessary details.
  • Use strong evidence. To make your case study convincing, you will need to use strong evidence. This can include statistics, data from research studies, or quotes from experts in the field.
  • Edit and proofread your work. Before you submit your case study, be sure to edit and proofread your work carefully. This will help to ensure that there are no errors and that your paper is clear and concise.

There you go!

We’re sure that now you have secrets to writing a great case study at your fingertips! This blog teaches the key guidelines of various case studies with samples. So grab your pen and start crafting a winning case study right away!

Having said that, we do understand that some of you might be having a hard time writing compelling case studies.

But worry not! Our expert case study writing service is here to take all your case-writing blues away! 

With 100% thorough research guaranteed, our professional essay writing service can craft an amazing case study within 6 hours! 

So why delay? Let us help you shine in the eyes of your instructor!

Barbara P (Literature, Marketing)

Dr. Barbara is a highly experienced writer and author who holds a Ph.D. degree in public health from an Ivy League school. She has worked in the medical field for many years, conducting extensive research on various health topics. Her writing has been featured in several top-tier publications.

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15+ Professional Case Study Examples [Design Tips + Templates]

By Alice Corner , Jan 12, 2023

Venngage case study examples

Have you ever bought something — within the last 10 years or so — without reading its reviews or without a recommendation or prior experience of using it?

If the answer is no — or at least, rarely — you get my point.

Positive reviews matter for selling to regular customers, and for B2B or SaaS businesses, detailed case studies are important too.

Wondering how to craft a compelling case study ? No worries—I’ve got you covered with 15 marketing case study templates , helpful tips, and examples to ensure your case study converts effectively.

Click to jump ahead:

  • What is a Case Study?

Business Case Study Examples

Simple case study examples.

  • Marketing Case Study Examples

Sales Case Study Examples

  • Case Study FAQs

What is a case study?

A case study is a research method to gain a better understanding of a subject or process. Case studies involve in-depth research into a given subject, in order to understand its functionality and successes.

In the context of a business, however, case studies take customer success stories and explore how they use your product to help them achieve their business goals.

Case Study Definition LinkedIn Post

As well as being valuable marketing tools , case studies are a good way to evaluate your product as it allows you to objectively examine how others are using it.

It’s also a good way to interview your customers about why they work with you.

Related: What is a Case Study? [+6 Types of Case Studies]

What is a marketing case study?

A marketing case study is a type of marketing where you use your existing customers as an example of what your product or services can achieve. You can also create case studies of internal, successful marketing projects.

Here’s an example of a marketing case study template:

marketing case study example

Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, business case studies can be a powerful resource to help with your sales, marketing, and even internal departmental awareness.

Business and business management case studies should encompass strategic insights alongside anecdotal and qualitative findings, like in the business case study examples below.

Conduct a B2B case study by researching the company holistically

When it comes to writing a case study, make sure you approach the company holistically and analyze everything from their social media to their sales.

Think about every avenue your product or service has been of use to your case study company, and ask them about the impact this has had on their wider company goals.

Venngage orange marketing case study example

In business case study examples like the one above, we can see that the company has been thought about holistically simply by the use of icons.

By combining social media icons with icons that show in-person communication we know that this is a well-researched and thorough case study.

This case study report example could also be used within an annual or end-of-year report.

Highlight the key takeaway from your marketing case study

To create a compelling case study, identify the key takeaways from your research. Use catchy language to sum up this information in a sentence, and present this sentence at the top of your page.

This is “at a glance” information and it allows people to gain a top-level understanding of the content immediately. 

Purple SAAS Business Case Study Template

You can use a large, bold, contrasting font to help this information stand out from the page and provide interest.

Learn  how to choose fonts  effectively with our Venngage guide and once you’ve done that.

Upload your fonts and  brand colors  to Venngage using the  My Brand Kit  tool and see them automatically applied to your designs.

The heading is the ideal place to put the most impactful information, as this is the first thing that people will read.

In this example, the stat of “Increase[d] lead quality by 90%” is used as the header. It makes customers want to read more to find out how exactly lead quality was increased by such a massive amount.

Purple SAAS Business Case Study Template Header

If you’re conducting an in-person interview, you could highlight a direct quote or insight provided by your interview subject.

Pick out a catchy sentence or phrase, or the key piece of information your interview subject provided and use that as a way to draw a potential customer in.

Use charts to visualize data in your business case studies

Charts are an excellent way to visualize data and to bring statistics and information to life. Charts make information easier to understand and to illustrate trends or patterns.

Making charts is even easier with Venngage.

In this consulting case study example, we can see that a chart has been used to demonstrate the difference in lead value within the Lead Elves case study.

Adding a chart here helps break up the information and add visual value to the case study. 

Red SAAS Business Case Study Template

Using charts in your case study can also be useful if you’re creating a project management case study.

You could use a Gantt chart or a project timeline to show how you have managed the project successfully.

event marketing project management gantt chart example

Use direct quotes to build trust in your marketing case study

To add an extra layer of authenticity you can include a direct quote from your customer within your case study.

According to research from Nielsen , 92% of people will trust a recommendation from a peer and 70% trust recommendations even if they’re from somebody they don’t know.

Case study peer recommendation quote

So if you have a customer or client who can’t stop singing your praises, make sure you get a direct quote from them and include it in your case study.

You can either lift part of the conversation or interview, or you can specifically request a quote. Make sure to ask for permission before using the quote.

Contrast Lead Generation Business Case Study Template

This design uses a bright contrasting speech bubble to show that it includes a direct quote, and helps the quote stand out from the rest of the text.

This will help draw the customer’s attention directly to the quote, in turn influencing them to use your product or service.

Less is often more, and this is especially true when it comes to creating designs. Whilst you want to create a professional-looking, well-written and design case study – there’s no need to overcomplicate things.

These simple case study examples show that smart clean designs and informative content can be an effective way to showcase your successes.

Use colors and fonts to create a professional-looking case study

Business case studies shouldn’t be boring. In fact, they should be beautifully and professionally designed.

This means the normal rules of design apply. Use fonts, colors, and icons to create an interesting and visually appealing case study.

In this case study example, we can see how multiple fonts have been used to help differentiate between the headers and content, as well as complementary colors and eye-catching icons.

Blue Simple Business Case Study Template

Marketing case study examples

Marketing case studies are incredibly useful for showing your marketing successes. Every successful marketing campaign relies on influencing a consumer’s behavior, and a great case study can be a great way to spotlight your biggest wins.

In the marketing case study examples below, a variety of designs and techniques to create impactful and effective case studies.

Show off impressive results with a bold marketing case study

Case studies are meant to show off your successes, so make sure you feature your positive results prominently. Using bold and bright colors as well as contrasting shapes, large bold fonts, and simple icons is a great way to highlight your wins.

In well-written case study examples like the one below, the big wins are highlighted on the second page with a bright orange color and are highlighted in circles.

Making the important data stand out is especially important when attracting a prospective customer with marketing case studies.

Light simplebusiness case study template

Use a simple but clear layout in your case study

Using a simple layout in your case study can be incredibly effective, like in the example of a case study below.

Keeping a clean white background, and using slim lines to help separate the sections is an easy way to format your case study.

Making the information clear helps draw attention to the important results, and it helps improve the  accessibility of the design .

Business case study examples like this would sit nicely within a larger report, with a consistent layout throughout.

Modern lead Generaton Business Case Study Template

Use visuals and icons to create an engaging and branded business case study

Nobody wants to read pages and pages of text — and that’s why Venngage wants to help you communicate your ideas visually.

Using icons, graphics, photos, or patterns helps create a much more engaging design. 

With this Blue Cap case study icons, colors, and impactful pattern designs have been used to create an engaging design that catches your eye.

Social Media Business Case Study template

Use a monochromatic color palette to create a professional and clean case study

Let your research shine by using a monochromatic and minimalistic color palette.

By sticking to one color, and leaving lots of blank space you can ensure your design doesn’t distract a potential customer from your case study content.

Color combination examples

In this case study on Polygon Media, the design is simple and professional, and the layout allows the prospective customer to follow the flow of information.

The gradient effect on the left-hand column helps break up the white background and adds an interesting visual effect.

Gray Lead Generation Business Case Study Template

Did you know you can generate an accessible color palette with Venngage? Try our free accessible color palette generator today and create a case study that delivers and looks pleasant to the eye:

Venngage's accessible color palette generator

Add long term goals in your case study

When creating a case study it’s a great idea to look at both the short term and the long term goals of the company to gain the best understanding possible of the insights they provide.

Short-term goals will be what the company or person hopes to achieve in the next few months, and long-term goals are what the company hopes to achieve in the next few years.

Check out this modern pattern design example of a case study below:

Lead generation business case study template

In this case study example, the short and long-term goals are clearly distinguished by light blue boxes and placed side by side so that they are easy to compare.

Lead generation case study example short term goals

Use a strong introductory paragraph to outline the overall strategy and goals before outlining the specific short-term and long-term goals to help with clarity.

This strategy can also be handy when creating a consulting case study.

Use data to make concrete points about your sales and successes

When conducting any sort of research stats, facts, and figures are like gold dust (aka, really valuable).

Being able to quantify your findings is important to help understand the information fully. Saying sales increased 10% is much more effective than saying sales increased.

While sales dashboards generally tend it make it all about the numbers and charts, in sales case study examples, like this one, the key data and findings can be presented with icons. This contributes to the potential customer’s better understanding of the report.

They can clearly comprehend the information and it shows that the case study has been well researched.

Vibrant Content Marketing Case Study Template

Use emotive, persuasive, or action based language in your marketing case study

Create a compelling case study by using emotive, persuasive and action-based language when customizing your case study template.

Case study example pursuasive language

In this well-written case study example, we can see that phrases such as “Results that Speak Volumes” and “Drive Sales” have been used.

Using persuasive language like you would in a blog post. It helps inspire potential customers to take action now.

Bold Content Marketing Case Study Template

Keep your potential customers in mind when creating a customer case study for marketing

82% of marketers use case studies in their marketing  because it’s such an effective tool to help quickly gain customers’ trust and to showcase the potential of your product.

Why are case studies such an important tool in content marketing?

By writing a case study you’re telling potential customers that they can trust you because you’re showing them that other people do.

Not only that, but if you have a SaaS product, business case studies are a great way to show how other people are effectively using your product in their company.

In this case study, Network is demonstrating how their product has been used by Vortex Co. with great success; instantly showing other potential customers that their tool works and is worth using.

Teal Social Media Business Case Study Template

Related: 10+ Case Study Infographic Templates That Convert

Case studies are particularly effective as a sales technique.

A sales case study is like an extended customer testimonial, not only sharing opinions of your product – but showcasing the results you helped your customer achieve.

Make impactful statistics pop in your sales case study

Writing a case study doesn’t mean using text as the only medium for sharing results.

You should use icons to highlight areas of your research that are particularly interesting or relevant, like in this example of a case study:

Coral content marketing case study template.jpg

Icons are a great way to help summarize information quickly and can act as visual cues to help draw the customer’s attention to certain areas of the page.

In some of the business case study examples above, icons are used to represent the impressive areas of growth and are presented in a way that grabs your attention.

Use high contrast shapes and colors to draw attention to key information in your sales case study

Help the key information stand out within your case study by using high contrast shapes and colors.

Use a complementary or contrasting color, or use a shape such as a rectangle or a circle for maximum impact.

Blue case study example case growth

This design has used dark blue rectangles to help separate the information and make it easier to read.

Coupled with icons and strong statistics, this information stands out on the page and is easily digestible and retainable for a potential customer.

Blue Content Marketing Case Study Tempalte

Case Study Examples Summary

Once you have created your case study, it’s best practice to update your examples on a regular basis to include up-to-date statistics, data, and information.

You should update your business case study examples often if you are sharing them on your website .

It’s also important that your case study sits within your brand guidelines – find out how Venngage’s My Brand Kit tool can help you create consistently branded case study templates.

Case studies are important marketing tools – but they shouldn’t be the only tool in your toolbox. Content marketing is also a valuable way to earn consumer trust.

Case Study FAQ

Why should you write a case study.

Case studies are an effective marketing technique to engage potential customers and help build trust.

By producing case studies featuring your current clients or customers, you are showcasing how your tool or product can be used. You’re also showing that other people endorse your product.

In addition to being a good way to gather positive testimonials from existing customers , business case studies are good educational resources and can be shared amongst your company or team, and used as a reference for future projects.

How should you write a case study?

To create a great case study, you should think strategically. The first step, before starting your case study research, is to think about what you aim to learn or what you aim to prove.

You might be aiming to learn how a company makes sales or develops a new product. If this is the case, base your questions around this.

You can learn more about writing a case study  from our extensive guide.

Related: How to Present a Case Study like a Pro (With Examples)

Some good questions you could ask would be:

  • Why do you use our tool or service?
  • How often do you use our tool or service?
  • What does the process of using our product look like to you?
  • If our product didn’t exist, what would you be doing instead?
  • What is the number one benefit you’ve found from using our tool?

You might also enjoy:

  • 12 Essential Consulting Templates For Marketing, Planning and Branding
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28 Case Study Examples Every Marketer Should See

Caroline Forsey

Published: March 08, 2023

Putting together a compelling case study is one of the most powerful strategies for showcasing your product and attracting future customers. But it's not easy to create case studies that your audience can’t wait to read.

marketer reviewing case study examples

In this post, we’ll go over the definition of a case study and the best examples to inspire you.

Download Now: 3 Free Case Study Templates

What is a case study?

A case study is a detailed story of something your company did. It includes a beginning — often discussing a conflict, an explanation of what happened next, and a resolution that explains how the company solved or improved on something.

A case study proves how your product has helped other companies by demonstrating real-life results. Not only that, but marketing case studies with solutions typically contain quotes from the customer. This means that they’re not just ads where you praise your own product. Rather, other companies are praising your company — and there’s no stronger marketing material than a verbal recommendation or testimonial. A great case study is also filled with research and stats to back up points made about a project's results.

There are myriad ways to use case studies in your marketing strategy . From featuring them on your website to including them in a sales presentation, a case study is a strong, persuasive tool that shows customers why they should work with you — straight from another customer. Writing one from scratch is hard, though, which is why we’ve created a collection of case study templates for you to get started.

Fill out the form below to access the free case study templates.

sites case study examples

Free Case Study Templates

Showcase your company's success using these three free case study templates.

  • Data-Driven Case Study Template
  • Product-Specific Case Study Template
  • General Case Study Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

There’s no better way to generate more leads than by writing case studies . But without case study examples to draw inspiration from, it can be difficult to write impactful studies that convince visitors to submit a form.

Marketing Case Study Examples

To help you create an attractive and high-converting case study, we've put together a list of some of our favorites. This list includes famous case studies in marketing, technology, and business.

These studies can show you how to frame your company offers in a way that is both meaningful and useful to your audience. So, take a look, and let these examples inspire your next brilliant case study design.

These marketing case studies with solutions show the value proposition of each product. They also show how each company benefited in both the short and long term using quantitative data. In other words, you don’t get just nice statements, like "This company helped us a lot." You see actual change within the firm through numbers and figures.

You can put your learnings into action with HubSpot's Free Case Study Templates . Available as custom designs and text-based documents, you can upload these templates to your CMS or send them to prospects as you see fit.

case study template

1. " How Handled Scaled from Zero to 121 Locations with the Help of HubSpot ," by HubSpot

Case study examples: Handled and HubSpot

What's interesting about this case study is the way it leads with the customer. That reflects a major HubSpot cornerstone, which is to always solve for the customer first. The copy leads with a brief description of why the CEO of Handled founded the company and why he thought Handled could benefit from adopting a CRM. The case study also opens up with one key data point about Handled’s success using HubSpot, namely that it grew to 121 locations.

Notice that this case study uses mixed media. Yes, there is a short video, but it's elaborated upon in the other text on the page. So while your case studies can use one or the other, don't be afraid to combine written copy with visuals to emphasize the project's success.

Key Learnings from the HubSpot Case Study Example

  • Give the case study a personal touch by focusing on the CEO rather than the company itself.
  • Use multimedia to engage website visitors as they read the case study.

2. " The Whole Package ," by IDEO

Case study examples: IDEO and H&M

Here's a design company that knows how to lead with simplicity in its case studies. As soon as the visitor arrives at the page, they’re greeted with a big, bold photo and the title of the case study — which just so happens to summarize how IDEO helped its client. It summarizes the case study in three snippets: The challenge, the impact, and the outcome.

Immediately, IDEO communicates its impact — the company partnered with H&M to remove plastic from its packaging — but it doesn't stop there. As the user scrolls down, the challenge, impact, and progress are elaborated upon with comprehensive (but not overwhelming) copy that outlines what that process looked like, replete with quotes and intriguing visuals.

Key Learnings from the IDEO Case Study Example

  • Split up the takeaways of your case studies into bite-sized sections.
  • Always use visuals and images to enrich the case study experience, especially if it’s a comprehensive case study.

3. " Rozum Robotics intensifies its PR game with Awario ," by Awario

Case study example from Awario

In this case study, Awario greets the user with a summary straight away — so if you’re feeling up to reading the entire case study, you can scan the snapshot and understand how the company serves its customers. The case study then includes jump links to several sections, such as "Company Profile," "Rozum Robotics' Pains," "Challenge," "Solution," and "Results and Improvements."

The sparse copy and prominent headings show that you don’t need a lot of elaborate information to show the value of your products and services. Like the other case study examples on this list, it includes visuals and quotes to demonstrate the effectiveness of the company’s efforts. The case study ends with a bulleted list that shows the results.

Key Learnings from the Awario Robotics Case Study Example

  • Create a table of contents to make your case study easier to navigate.
  • Include a bulleted list of the results you achieved for your client.

4. " Chevrolet DTU ," by Carol H. Williams

Case study examples: Carol H. Williams and Chevrolet DTU

If you’ve worked with a company that’s well-known, use only the name in the title — like Carol H. Williams, one of the nation’s top advertising agencies, does here. The "DTU," stands for "Discover the Unexpected." It generates interest because you want to find out what the initials mean.

They keep your interest in this case study by using a mixture of headings, images, and videos to describe the challenges, objectives, and solutions of the project. The case study closes with a summary of the key achievements that Chevrolet’s DTU Journalism Fellows reached during the project.

Key Learnings from the Carol H. Williams Case Study Example

  • If you’ve worked with a big brand before, consider only using the name in the title — just enough to pique interest.
  • Use a mixture of headings and subheadings to guide users through the case study.

5. " How Fractl Earned Links from 931 Unique Domains for Porch.com in a Single Year ," by Fractl

Case study example from Fractl

Fractl uses both text and graphic design in their Porch.com case study to immerse the viewer in a more interesting user experience. For instance, as you scroll, you'll see the results are illustrated in an infographic-design form as well as the text itself.

Further down the page, they use icons like a heart and a circle to illustrate their pitch angles, and graphs to showcase their results. Rather than writing which publications have mentioned Porch.com during Fractl’s campaign, they incorporated the media outlets’ icons for further visual diversity.

Key Learnings from the Fractl Case Study Example

  • Let pictures speak for you by incorporating graphs, logos, and icons all throughout the case study.
  • Start the case study by right away stating the key results, like Fractl does, instead of putting the results all the way at the bottom.

6. " The Met ," by Fantasy

Case study example from Fantasy

What's the best way to showcase the responsiveness and user interface of a website? Probably by diving right into it with a series of simple showcases— which is exactly what Fantasy does on their case study page for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They keep the page simple and clean, inviting you to review their redesign of the Met’s website feature-by-feature.

Each section is simple, showing a single piece of the new website's interface so that users aren’t overwhelmed with information and can focus on what matters most.

If you're more interested in text, you can read the objective for each feature. Fantasy understands that, as a potential customer, this is all you need to know. Scrolling further, you're greeted with a simple "Contact Us" CTA.

Key Learnings from the Fantasy Case Study Example

  • You don’t have to write a ton of text to create a great case study. Focus on the solution you delivered itself.
  • Include a CTA at the bottom inviting visitors to contact you.

7. " Rovio: How Rovio Grew Into a Gaming Superpower ," by App Annie

Case study example from App Annie

If your client had a lot of positive things to say about you, take a note from App Annie’s Rovio case study and open up with a quote from your client. The case study also closes with a quote, so that the case study doesn’t seem like a promotion written by your marketing team but a story that’s taken straight from your client’s mouth. It includes a photo of a Rovio employee, too.

Another thing this example does well? It immediately includes a link to the product that Rovio used (namely, App Annie Intelligence) at the top of the case study. The case study closes with a call-to-action button prompting users to book a demo.

Key Learnings from the App Annie Case Study Example

  • Feature quotes from your client at the beginning and end of the case study.
  • Include a mention of the product right at the beginning and prompt users to learn more about the product.

8. " Embracing first-party data: 3 success stories from HubSpot ," by Think with Google

Case study examples: Think with Google and HubSpot

Google takes a different approach to text-focused case studies by choosing three different companies to highlight.

The case study is clean and easily scannable. It has sections for each company, with quotes and headers that clarify the way these three distinct stories connect. The simple format also uses colors and text that align with the Google brand.

Another differentiator is the focus on data. This case study is less than a thousand words, but it's packed with useful data points. Data-driven insights quickly and clearly show how the value of leveraging first-party data while prioritizing consumer privacy.

Case studies example: Data focus, Think with Google

Key Learnings from the Think with Google Case Study Example

  • A case study doesn’t need to be long or complex to be powerful.
  • Clear data points are a quick and effective way to prove value.

9. " In-Depth Performance Marketing Case Study ," by Switch

Case study example from Switch

Switch is an international marketing agency based in Malta that knocks it out of the park with this case study. Its biggest challenge is effectively communicating what it did for its client without ever revealing the client’s name. It also effectively keeps non-marketers in the loop by including a glossary of terms on page 4.

The PDF case study reads like a compelling research article, including titles like "In-Depth Performance Marketing Case Study," "Scenario," and "Approach," so that readers get a high-level overview of what the client needed and why they approached Switch. It also includes a different page for each strategy. For instance, if you’d only be interested in hiring Switch for optimizing your Facebook ads, you can skip to page 10 to see how they did it.

The PDF is fourteen pages long but features big fonts and plenty of white space, so viewers can easily skim it in only a few minutes.

Key Learnings from the Switch Case Study Example

  • If you want to go into specialized information, include a glossary of terms so that non-specialists can easily understand.
  • Close with a CTA page in your case study PDF and include contact information for prospective clients.

10. " Gila River ," by OH Partners

Case study example from OH Partners

Let pictures speak for you, like OH Partners did in this case study. While you’ll quickly come across a heading and some text when you land on this case study page, you’ll get the bulk of the case study through examples of actual work OH Partners did for its client. You will see OH Partners’ work in a billboard, magazine, and video. This communicates to website visitors that if they work with OH Partners, their business will be visible everywhere.

And like the other case studies here, it closes with a summary of what the firm achieved for its client in an eye-catching way.

Key Learnings from the OH Partners Case Study Example

  • Let the visuals speak by including examples of the actual work you did for your client — which is especially useful for branding and marketing agencies.
  • Always close out with your achievements and how they impacted your client.

11. " Facing a Hater ," by Digitas

Case study example from Digitas

Digitas' case study page for Sprite’s #ILOVEYOUHATER campaign keeps it brief while communicating the key facts of Digitas’ work for the popular soda brand. The page opens with an impactful image of a hundred people facing a single man. It turns out, that man is the biggest "bully" in Argentina, and the people facing him are those whom he’s bullied before.

Scrolling down, it's obvious that Digitas kept Sprite at the forefront of their strategy, but more than that, they used real people as their focal point. They leveraged the Twitter API to pull data from Tweets that people had actually tweeted to find the identity of the biggest "hater" in the country. That turned out to be @AguanteElCofler, a Twitter user who has since been suspended.

Key Learnings from the Digitas Case Study Example

  • If a video was part of your work for your client, be sure to include the most impactful screenshot as the heading.
  • Don’t be afraid to provide details on how you helped your client achieve their goals, including the tools you leveraged.

12. " Better Experiences for All ," by HermanMiller

Case study example from HermanMiller

HermanMiller sells sleek, utilitarian furniture with no frills and extreme functionality, and that ethos extends to its case study page for a hospital in Dubai.

What first attracted me to this case study was the beautiful video at the top and the clean user experience. User experience matters a lot in a case study. It determines whether users will keep reading or leave. Another notable aspect of this case study is that the video includes closed-captioning for greater accessibility, and users have the option of expanding the CC and searching through the text.

HermanMiller’s case study also offers an impressive amount of information packed in just a few short paragraphs for those wanting to understand the nuances of their strategy. It closes out with a quote from their client and, most importantly, the list of furniture products that the hospital purchased from the brand.

Key Learnings from the HermanMiller Case Study Example

  • Close out with a list of products that users can buy after reading the case study.
  • Include accessibility features such as closed captioning and night mode to make your case study more user-friendly.

13. " Capital One on AWS ," by Amazon

Case study example from Amazon AWS

Do you work continuously with your clients? Consider structuring your case study page like Amazon did in this stellar case study example. Instead of just featuring one article about Capital One and how it benefited from using AWS, Amazon features a series of articles that you can then access if you’re interested in reading more. It goes all the way back to 2016, all with different stories that feature Capital One’s achievements using AWS.

This may look unattainable for a small firm, but you don’t have to go to extreme measures and do it for every single one of your clients. You could choose the one you most wish to focus on and establish a contact both on your side and your client’s for coming up with the content. Check in every year and write a new piece. These don’t have to be long, either — five hundred to eight hundred words will do.

Key Learnings from the Amazon AWS Case Study Example

  • Write a new article each year featuring one of your clients, then include links to those articles in one big case study page.
  • Consider including external articles as well that emphasize your client’s success in their industry.

14. " HackReactor teaches the world to code #withAsana ," by Asana

Case study examples: Asana and HackReactor

While Asana's case study design looks text-heavy, there's a good reason. It reads like a creative story, told entirely from the customer's perspective.

For instance, Asana knows you won't trust its word alone on why this product is useful. So, they let Tony Phillips, HackReactor CEO, tell you instead: "We take in a lot of information. Our brains are awful at storage but very good at thinking; you really start to want some third party to store your information so you can do something with it."

Asana features frequent quotes from Phillips to break up the wall of text and humanize the case study. It reads like an in-depth interview and captivates the reader through creative storytelling. Even more, Asana includes in-depth detail about how HackReactor uses Asana. This includes how they build templates and workflows:

"There's a huge differentiator between Asana and other tools, and that’s the very easy API access. Even if Asana isn’t the perfect fit for a workflow, someone like me— a relatively mediocre software engineer—can add functionality via the API to build a custom solution that helps a team get more done."

Key Learnings from the Asana Example

  • Include quotes from your client throughout the case study.
  • Provide extensive detail on how your client worked with you or used your product.

15. " Rips Sewed, Brand Love Reaped ," by Amp Agency

Case study example from Amp Agency

Amp Agency's Patagonia marketing strategy aimed to appeal to a new audience through guerrilla marketing efforts and a coast-to-coast road trip. Their case study page effectively conveys a voyager theme, complete with real photos of Patagonia customers from across the U.S., and a map of the expedition. I liked Amp Agency's storytelling approach best. It captures viewers' attention from start to finish simply because it's an intriguing and unique approach to marketing.

Key Learnings from the Amp Agency Example

  • Open up with a summary that communicates who your client is and why they reached out to you.
  • Like in the other case study examples, you’ll want to close out with a quantitative list of your achievements.

16. " NetApp ," by Evisort

Case study examples: Evisort and NetApp

Evisort opens up its NetApp case study with an at-a-glance overview of the client. It’s imperative to always focus on the client in your case study — not on your amazing product and equally amazing team. By opening up with a snapshot of the client’s company, Evisort places the focus on the client.

This case study example checks all the boxes for a great case study that’s informative, thorough, and compelling. It includes quotes from the client and details about the challenges NetApp faced during the COVID pandemic. It closes out with a quote from the client and with a link to download the case study in PDF format, which is incredibly important if you want your case study to be accessible in a wider variety of formats.

Key Learnings from the Evisort Example

  • Place the focus immediately on your client by including a snapshot of their company.
  • Mention challenging eras, such as a pandemic or recession, to show how your company can help your client succeed even during difficult times.

17. " Copernicus Land Monitoring – CLC+ Core ," by Cloudflight

Case study example from Cloudflight

Including highly specialized information in your case study is an effective way to show prospects that you’re not just trying to get their business. You’re deep within their industry, too, and willing to learn everything you need to learn to create a solution that works specifically for them.

Cloudflight does a splendid job at that in its Copernicus Land Monitoring case study. While the information may be difficult to read at first glance, it will capture the interest of prospects who are in the environmental industry. It thus shows Cloudflight’s value as a partner much more effectively than a general case study would.

The page is comprehensive and ends with a compelling call-to-action — "Looking for a solution that automates, and enhances your Big Data system? Are you struggling with large datasets and accessibility? We would be happy to advise and support you!" The clean, whitespace-heavy page is an effective example of using a case study to capture future leads.

Key Learnings from the Cloudflight Case Study Example

  • Don’t be afraid to get technical in your explanation of what you did for your client.
  • Include a snapshot of the sales representative prospects should contact, especially if you have different sales reps for different industries, like Cloudflight does.

18. " Valvoline Increases Coupon Send Rate by 76% with Textel’s MMS Picture Texting ," by Textel

Case study example from Textel

If you’re targeting large enterprises with a long purchasing cycle, you’ll want to include a wealth of information in an easily transferable format. That’s what Textel does here in its PDF case study for Valvoline. It greets the user with an eye-catching headline that shows the value of using Textel. Valvoline saw a significant return on investment from using the platform.

Another smart decision in this case study is highlighting the client’s quote by putting it in green font and doing the same thing for the client’s results because it helps the reader quickly connect the two pieces of information. If you’re in a hurry, you can also take a look at the "At a Glance" column to get the key facts of the case study, starting with information about Valvoline.

Key Learnings from the Textel Case Study Example

  • Include your client’s ROI right in the title of the case study.
  • Add an "At a Glance" column to your case study PDF to make it easy to get insights without needing to read all the text.

19. " Hunt Club and Happeo — a tech-enabled love story ," by Happeo

Case study example from Happeo

In this blog-post-like case study, Happeo opens with a quote from the client, then dives into a compelling heading: "Technology at the forefront of Hunt Club's strategy." Say you’re investigating Happeo as a solution and consider your firm to be technology-driven. This approach would spark your curiosity about why the client chose to work with Happeo. It also effectively communicates the software’s value proposition without sounding like it’s coming from an in-house marketing team.

Every paragraph is a quote written from the customer’s perspective. Later down the page, the case study also dives into "the features that changed the game for Hunt Club," giving Happeo a chance to highlight some of the platform’s most salient features.

Key Learnings from the Happeo Case Study Example

  • Consider writing the entirety of the case study from the perspective of the customer.
  • Include a list of the features that convinced your client to go with you.

20. " Red Sox Season Campaign ," by CTP Boston

Case study example from CTP Boston

What's great about CTP's case study page for their Red Sox Season Campaign is their combination of video, images, and text. A video automatically begins playing when you visit the page, and as you scroll, you'll see more embedded videos of Red Sox players, a compilation of print ads, and social media images you can click to enlarge.

At the bottom, it says "Find out how we can do something similar for your brand." The page is clean, cohesive, and aesthetically pleasing. It invites viewers to appreciate the well-roundedness of CTP's campaign for Boston's beloved baseball team.

Key Learnings from the CTP Case Study Example

  • Include a video in the heading of the case study.
  • Close with a call-to-action that makes leads want to turn into prospects.

21. " Acoustic ," by Genuine

Case study example from Genuine

Sometimes, simple is key. Genuine's case study for Acoustic is straightforward and minimal, with just a few short paragraphs, including "Reimagining the B2B website experience," "Speaking to marketers 1:1," and "Inventing Together." After the core of the case study, we then see a quote from Acoustic’s CMO and the results Genuine achieved for the company.

The simplicity of the page allows the reader to focus on both the visual aspects and the copy. The page displays Genuine's brand personality while offering the viewer all the necessary information they need.

  • You don’t need to write a lot to create a great case study. Keep it simple.
  • Always include quantifiable data to illustrate the results you achieved for your client.

22. " Using Apptio Targetprocess Automated Rules in Wargaming ," by Apptio

Case study example from Apptio

Apptio’s case study for Wargaming summarizes three key pieces of information right at the beginning: The goals, the obstacles, and the results.

Readers then have the opportunity to continue reading — or they can walk away right then with the information they need. This case study also excels in keeping the human interest factor by formatting the information like an interview.

The piece is well-organized and uses compelling headers to keep the reader engaged. Despite its length, Apptio's case study is appealing enough to keep the viewer's attention. Every Apptio case study ends with a "recommendation for other companies" section, where the client can give advice for other companies that are looking for a similar solution but aren’t sure how to get started.

Key Learnings from the Apptio Case Study Example

  • Put your client in an advisory role by giving them the opportunity to give recommendations to other companies that are reading the case study.
  • Include the takeaways from the case study right at the beginning so prospects quickly get what they need.

23. " Airbnb + Zendesk: building a powerful solution together ," by Zendesk

Case study example from Zendesk

Zendesk's Airbnb case study reads like a blog post, and focuses equally on Zendesk and Airbnb, highlighting a true partnership between the companies. To captivate readers, it begins like this: "Halfway around the globe is a place to stay with your name on it. At least for a weekend."

The piece focuses on telling a good story and provides photographs of beautiful Airbnb locations. In a case study meant to highlight Zendesk's helpfulness, nothing could be more authentic than their decision to focus on Airbnb's service in such great detail.

Key Learnings from the Zendesk Case Study Example

  • Include images of your client’s offerings — not necessarily of the service or product you provided. Notice how Zendesk doesn’t include screenshots of its product.
  • Include a call-to-action right at the beginning of the case study. Zendesk gives you two options: to find a solution or start a trial.

24. " Biobot Customer Success Story: Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida ," by Biobot

Case study example from Biobot

Like some of the other top examples in this list, Biobot opens its case study with a quote from its client, which captures the value proposition of working with Biobot. It mentions the COVID pandemic and goes into detail about the challenges the client faced during this time.

This case study is structured more like a news article than a traditional case study. This format can work in more formal industries where decision-makers need to see in-depth information about the case. Be sure to test different methods and measure engagement .

Key Learnings from the Biobot Case Study Example

  • Mention environmental, public health, or economic emergencies and how you helped your client get past such difficult times.
  • Feel free to write the case study like a normal blog post, but be sure to test different methods to find the one that best works for you.

25. " Discovering Cost Savings With Efficient Decision Making ," by Gartner

Case study example from Gartner

You don't always need a ton of text or a video to convey your message — sometimes, you just need a few paragraphs and bullet points. Gartner does a fantastic job of quickly providing the fundamental statistics a potential customer would need to know, without boggling down their readers with dense paragraphs. The case study closes with a shaded box that summarizes the impact that Gartner had on its client. It includes a quote and a call-to-action to "Learn More."

Key Learnings from the Gartner Case Study Example

  • Feel free to keep the case study short.
  • Include a call-to-action at the bottom that takes the reader to a page that most relates to them.

26. " Bringing an Operator to the Game ," by Redapt

Case study example from Redapt

This case study example by Redapt is another great demonstration of the power of summarizing your case study’s takeaways right at the start of the study. Redapt includes three easy-to-scan columns: "The problem," "the solution," and "the outcome." But its most notable feature is a section titled "Moment of clarity," which shows why this particular project was difficult or challenging.

The section is shaded in green, making it impossible to miss. Redapt does the same thing for each case study. In the same way, you should highlight the "turning point" for both you and your client when you were working toward a solution.

Key Learnings from the Redapt Case Study Example

  • Highlight the turning point for both you and your client during the solution-seeking process.
  • Use the same structure (including the same headings) for your case studies to make them easy to scan and read.

27. " Virtual Call Center Sees 300% Boost In Contact Rate ," by Convoso

Case study example from Convoso

Convoso’s PDF case study for Digital Market Media immediately mentions the results that the client achieved and takes advantage of white space. On the second page, the case study presents more influential results. It’s colorful and engaging and closes with a spread that prompts readers to request a demo.

Key Learnings from the Convoso Case Study Example

  • List the results of your work right at the beginning of the case study.
  • Use color to differentiate your case study from others. Convoso’s example is one of the most colorful ones on this list.

28. " Ensuring quality of service during a pandemic ," by Ericsson

Case study example from Ericsson

Ericsson’s case study page for Orange Spain is an excellent example of using diverse written and visual media — such as videos, graphs, and quotes — to showcase the success a client experienced. Throughout the case study, Ericsson provides links to product and service pages users might find relevant as they’re reading the study.

For instance, under the heading "Preloaded with the power of automation," Ericsson mentions its Ericsson Operations Engine product, then links to that product page. It closes the case study with a link to another product page.

Key Learnings from the Ericsson Case Study Example

  • Link to product pages throughout the case study so that readers can learn more about the solution you offer.
  • Use multimedia to engage users as they read the case study.

Start creating your case study.

Now that you've got a great list of examples of case studies, think about a topic you'd like to write about that highlights your company or work you did with a customer.

A customer’s success story is the most persuasive marketing material you could ever create. With a strong portfolio of case studies, you can ensure prospects know why they should give you their business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Methodology

  • What Is a Case Study? | Definition, Examples & Methods

What Is a Case Study? | Definition, Examples & Methods

Published on May 8, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on November 20, 2023.

A case study is a detailed study of a specific subject, such as a person, group, place, event, organization, or phenomenon. Case studies are commonly used in social, educational, clinical, and business research.

A case study research design usually involves qualitative methods , but quantitative methods are sometimes also used. Case studies are good for describing , comparing, evaluating and understanding different aspects of a research problem .

Table of contents

When to do a case study, step 1: select a case, step 2: build a theoretical framework, step 3: collect your data, step 4: describe and analyze the case, other interesting articles.

A case study is an appropriate research design when you want to gain concrete, contextual, in-depth knowledge about a specific real-world subject. It allows you to explore the key characteristics, meanings, and implications of the case.

Case studies are often a good choice in a thesis or dissertation . They keep your project focused and manageable when you don’t have the time or resources to do large-scale research.

You might use just one complex case study where you explore a single subject in depth, or conduct multiple case studies to compare and illuminate different aspects of your research problem.

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Once you have developed your problem statement and research questions , you should be ready to choose the specific case that you want to focus on. A good case study should have the potential to:

  • Provide new or unexpected insights into the subject
  • Challenge or complicate existing assumptions and theories
  • Propose practical courses of action to resolve a problem
  • Open up new directions for future research

TipIf your research is more practical in nature and aims to simultaneously investigate an issue as you solve it, consider conducting action research instead.

Unlike quantitative or experimental research , a strong case study does not require a random or representative sample. In fact, case studies often deliberately focus on unusual, neglected, or outlying cases which may shed new light on the research problem.

Example of an outlying case studyIn the 1960s the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania was discovered to have extremely low rates of heart disease compared to the US average. It became an important case study for understanding previously neglected causes of heart disease.

However, you can also choose a more common or representative case to exemplify a particular category, experience or phenomenon.

Example of a representative case studyIn the 1920s, two sociologists used Muncie, Indiana as a case study of a typical American city that supposedly exemplified the changing culture of the US at the time.

While case studies focus more on concrete details than general theories, they should usually have some connection with theory in the field. This way the case study is not just an isolated description, but is integrated into existing knowledge about the topic. It might aim to:

  • Exemplify a theory by showing how it explains the case under investigation
  • Expand on a theory by uncovering new concepts and ideas that need to be incorporated
  • Challenge a theory by exploring an outlier case that doesn’t fit with established assumptions

To ensure that your analysis of the case has a solid academic grounding, you should conduct a literature review of sources related to the topic and develop a theoretical framework . This means identifying key concepts and theories to guide your analysis and interpretation.

There are many different research methods you can use to collect data on your subject. Case studies tend to focus on qualitative data using methods such as interviews , observations , and analysis of primary and secondary sources (e.g., newspaper articles, photographs, official records). Sometimes a case study will also collect quantitative data.

Example of a mixed methods case studyFor a case study of a wind farm development in a rural area, you could collect quantitative data on employment rates and business revenue, collect qualitative data on local people’s perceptions and experiences, and analyze local and national media coverage of the development.

The aim is to gain as thorough an understanding as possible of the case and its context.

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In writing up the case study, you need to bring together all the relevant aspects to give as complete a picture as possible of the subject.

How you report your findings depends on the type of research you are doing. Some case studies are structured like a standard scientific paper or thesis , with separate sections or chapters for the methods , results and discussion .

Others are written in a more narrative style, aiming to explore the case from various angles and analyze its meanings and implications (for example, by using textual analysis or discourse analysis ).

In all cases, though, make sure to give contextual details about the case, connect it back to the literature and theory, and discuss how it fits into wider patterns or debates.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

  • Normal distribution
  • Degrees of freedom
  • Null hypothesis
  • Discourse analysis
  • Control groups
  • Mixed methods research
  • Non-probability sampling
  • Quantitative research
  • Ecological validity

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How to write a case study — examples, templates, and tools

sites case study examples

It’s a marketer’s job to communicate the effectiveness of a product or service to potential and current customers to convince them to buy and keep business moving. One of the best methods for doing this is to share success stories that are relatable to prospects and customers based on their pain points, experiences, and overall needs.

That’s where case studies come in. Case studies are an essential part of a content marketing plan. These in-depth stories of customer experiences are some of the most effective at demonstrating the value of a product or service. Yet many marketers don’t use them, whether because of their regimented formats or the process of customer involvement and approval.

A case study is a powerful tool for showcasing your hard work and the success your customer achieved. But writing a great case study can be difficult if you’ve never done it before or if it’s been a while. This guide will show you how to write an effective case study and provide real-world examples and templates that will keep readers engaged and support your business.

In this article, you’ll learn:

What is a case study?

How to write a case study, case study templates, case study examples, case study tools.

A case study is the detailed story of a customer’s experience with a product or service that demonstrates their success and often includes measurable outcomes. Case studies are used in a range of fields and for various reasons, from business to academic research. They’re especially impactful in marketing as brands work to convince and convert consumers with relatable, real-world stories of actual customer experiences.

The best case studies tell the story of a customer’s success, including the steps they took, the results they achieved, and the support they received from a brand along the way. To write a great case study, you need to:

  • Celebrate the customer and make them — not a product or service — the star of the story.
  • Craft the story with specific audiences or target segments in mind so that the story of one customer will be viewed as relatable and actionable for another customer.
  • Write copy that is easy to read and engaging so that readers will gain the insights and messages intended.
  • Follow a standardized format that includes all of the essentials a potential customer would find interesting and useful.
  • Support all of the claims for success made in the story with data in the forms of hard numbers and customer statements.

Case studies are a type of review but more in depth, aiming to show — rather than just tell — the positive experiences that customers have with a brand. Notably, 89% of consumers read reviews before deciding to buy, and 79% view case study content as part of their purchasing process. When it comes to B2B sales, 52% of buyers rank case studies as an important part of their evaluation process.

Telling a brand story through the experience of a tried-and-true customer matters. The story is relatable to potential new customers as they imagine themselves in the shoes of the company or individual featured in the case study. Showcasing previous customers can help new ones see themselves engaging with your brand in the ways that are most meaningful to them.

Besides sharing the perspective of another customer, case studies stand out from other content marketing forms because they are based on evidence. Whether pulling from client testimonials or data-driven results, case studies tend to have more impact on new business because the story contains information that is both objective (data) and subjective (customer experience) — and the brand doesn’t sound too self-promotional.

89% of consumers read reviews before buying, 79% view case studies, and 52% of B2B buyers prioritize case studies in the evaluation process.

Case studies are unique in that there’s a fairly standardized format for telling a customer’s story. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for creativity. It’s all about making sure that teams are clear on the goals for the case study — along with strategies for supporting content and channels — and understanding how the story fits within the framework of the company’s overall marketing goals.

Here are the basic steps to writing a good case study.

1. Identify your goal

Start by defining exactly who your case study will be designed to help. Case studies are about specific instances where a company works with a customer to achieve a goal. Identify which customers are likely to have these goals, as well as other needs the story should cover to appeal to them.

The answer is often found in one of the buyer personas that have been constructed as part of your larger marketing strategy. This can include anything from new leads generated by the marketing team to long-term customers that are being pressed for cross-sell opportunities. In all of these cases, demonstrating value through a relatable customer success story can be part of the solution to conversion.

2. Choose your client or subject

Who you highlight matters. Case studies tie brands together that might otherwise not cross paths. A writer will want to ensure that the highlighted customer aligns with their own company’s brand identity and offerings. Look for a customer with positive name recognition who has had great success with a product or service and is willing to be an advocate.

The client should also match up with the identified target audience. Whichever company or individual is selected should be a reflection of other potential customers who can see themselves in similar circumstances, having the same problems and possible solutions.

Some of the most compelling case studies feature customers who:

  • Switch from one product or service to another while naming competitors that missed the mark.
  • Experience measurable results that are relatable to others in a specific industry.
  • Represent well-known brands and recognizable names that are likely to compel action.
  • Advocate for a product or service as a champion and are well-versed in its advantages.

Whoever or whatever customer is selected, marketers must ensure they have the permission of the company involved before getting started. Some brands have strict review and approval procedures for any official marketing or promotional materials that include their name. Acquiring those approvals in advance will prevent any miscommunication or wasted effort if there is an issue with their legal or compliance teams.

3. Conduct research and compile data

Substantiating the claims made in a case study — either by the marketing team or customers themselves — adds validity to the story. To do this, include data and feedback from the client that defines what success looks like. This can be anything from demonstrating return on investment (ROI) to a specific metric the customer was striving to improve. Case studies should prove how an outcome was achieved and show tangible results that indicate to the customer that your solution is the right one.

This step could also include customer interviews. Make sure that the people being interviewed are key stakeholders in the purchase decision or deployment and use of the product or service that is being highlighted. Content writers should work off a set list of questions prepared in advance. It can be helpful to share these with the interviewees beforehand so they have time to consider and craft their responses. One of the best interview tactics to keep in mind is to ask questions where yes and no are not natural answers. This way, your subject will provide more open-ended responses that produce more meaningful content.

4. Choose the right format

There are a number of different ways to format a case study. Depending on what you hope to achieve, one style will be better than another. However, there are some common elements to include, such as:

  • An engaging headline
  • A subject and customer introduction
  • The unique challenge or challenges the customer faced
  • The solution the customer used to solve the problem
  • The results achieved
  • Data and statistics to back up claims of success
  • A strong call to action (CTA) to engage with the vendor

It’s also important to note that while case studies are traditionally written as stories, they don’t have to be in a written format. Some companies choose to get more creative with their case studies and produce multimedia content, depending on their audience and objectives. Case study formats can include traditional print stories, interactive web or social content, data-heavy infographics, professionally shot videos, podcasts, and more.

5. Write your case study

We’ll go into more detail later about how exactly to write a case study, including templates and examples. Generally speaking, though, there are a few things to keep in mind when writing your case study.

  • Be clear and concise. Readers want to get to the point of the story quickly and easily, and they’ll be looking to see themselves reflected in the story right from the start.
  • Provide a big picture. Always make sure to explain who the client is, their goals, and how they achieved success in a short introduction to engage the reader.
  • Construct a clear narrative. Stick to the story from the perspective of the customer and what they needed to solve instead of just listing product features or benefits.
  • Leverage graphics. Incorporating infographics, charts, and sidebars can be a more engaging and eye-catching way to share key statistics and data in readable ways.
  • Offer the right amount of detail. Most case studies are one or two pages with clear sections that a reader can skim to find the information most important to them.
  • Include data to support claims. Show real results — both facts and figures and customer quotes — to demonstrate credibility and prove the solution works.

6. Promote your story

Marketers have a number of options for distribution of a freshly minted case study. Many brands choose to publish case studies on their website and post them on social media. This can help support SEO and organic content strategies while also boosting company credibility and trust as visitors see that other businesses have used the product or service.

Marketers are always looking for quality content they can use for lead generation. Consider offering a case study as gated content behind a form on a landing page or as an offer in an email message. One great way to do this is to summarize the content and tease the full story available for download after the user takes an action.

Sales teams can also leverage case studies, so be sure they are aware that the assets exist once they’re published. Especially when it comes to larger B2B sales, companies often ask for examples of similar customer challenges that have been solved.

Now that you’ve learned a bit about case studies and what they should include, you may be wondering how to start creating great customer story content. Here are a couple of templates you can use to structure your case study.

Template 1 — Challenge-solution-result format

  • Start with an engaging title. This should be fewer than 70 characters long for SEO best practices. One of the best ways to approach the title is to include the customer’s name and a hint at the challenge they overcame in the end.
  • Create an introduction. Lead with an explanation as to who the customer is, the need they had, and the opportunity they found with a specific product or solution. Writers can also suggest the success the customer experienced with the solution they chose.
  • Present the challenge. This should be several paragraphs long and explain the problem the customer faced and the issues they were trying to solve. Details should tie into the company’s products and services naturally. This section needs to be the most relatable to the reader so they can picture themselves in a similar situation.
  • Share the solution. Explain which product or service offered was the ideal fit for the customer and why. Feel free to delve into their experience setting up, purchasing, and onboarding the solution.
  • Explain the results. Demonstrate the impact of the solution they chose by backing up their positive experience with data. Fill in with customer quotes and tangible, measurable results that show the effect of their choice.
  • Ask for action. Include a CTA at the end of the case study that invites readers to reach out for more information, try a demo, or learn more — to nurture them further in the marketing pipeline. What you ask of the reader should tie directly into the goals that were established for the case study in the first place.

Template 2 — Data-driven format

  • Start with an engaging title. Be sure to include a statistic or data point in the first 70 characters. Again, it’s best to include the customer’s name as part of the title.
  • Create an overview. Share the customer’s background and a short version of the challenge they faced. Present the reason a particular product or service was chosen, and feel free to include quotes from the customer about their selection process.
  • Present data point 1. Isolate the first metric that the customer used to define success and explain how the product or solution helped to achieve this goal. Provide data points and quotes to substantiate the claim that success was achieved.
  • Present data point 2. Isolate the second metric that the customer used to define success and explain what the product or solution did to achieve this goal. Provide data points and quotes to substantiate the claim that success was achieved.
  • Present data point 3. Isolate the final metric that the customer used to define success and explain what the product or solution did to achieve this goal. Provide data points and quotes to substantiate the claim that success was achieved.
  • Summarize the results. Reiterate the fact that the customer was able to achieve success thanks to a specific product or service. Include quotes and statements that reflect customer satisfaction and suggest they plan to continue using the solution.
  • Ask for action. Include a CTA at the end of the case study that asks readers to reach out for more information, try a demo, or learn more — to further nurture them in the marketing pipeline. Again, remember that this is where marketers can look to convert their content into action with the customer.

While templates are helpful, seeing a case study in action can also be a great way to learn. Here are some examples of how Adobe customers have experienced success.

Juniper Networks

One example is the Adobe and Juniper Networks case study , which puts the reader in the customer’s shoes. The beginning of the story quickly orients the reader so that they know exactly who the article is about and what they were trying to achieve. Solutions are outlined in a way that shows Adobe Experience Manager is the best choice and a natural fit for the customer. Along the way, quotes from the client are incorporated to help add validity to the statements. The results in the case study are conveyed with clear evidence of scale and volume using tangible data.

A Lenovo case study showing statistics, a pull quote and featured headshot, the headline "The customer is king.," and Adobe product links.

The story of Lenovo’s journey with Adobe is one that spans years of planning, implementation, and rollout. The Lenovo case study does a great job of consolidating all of this into a relatable journey that other enterprise organizations can see themselves taking, despite the project size. This case study also features descriptive headers and compelling visual elements that engage the reader and strengthen the content.

Tata Consulting

When it comes to using data to show customer results, this case study does an excellent job of conveying details and numbers in an easy-to-digest manner. Bullet points at the start break up the content while also helping the reader understand exactly what the case study will be about. Tata Consulting used Adobe to deliver elevated, engaging content experiences for a large telecommunications client of its own — an objective that’s relatable for a lot of companies.

Case studies are a vital tool for any marketing team as they enable you to demonstrate the value of your company’s products and services to others. They help marketers do their job and add credibility to a brand trying to promote its solutions by using the experiences and stories of real customers.

When you’re ready to get started with a case study:

  • Think about a few goals you’d like to accomplish with your content.
  • Make a list of successful clients that would be strong candidates for a case study.
  • Reach out to the client to get their approval and conduct an interview.
  • Gather the data to present an engaging and effective customer story.

Adobe can help

There are several Adobe products that can help you craft compelling case studies. Adobe Experience Platform helps you collect data and deliver great customer experiences across every channel. Once you’ve created your case studies, Experience Platform will help you deliver the right information to the right customer at the right time for maximum impact.

To learn more, watch the Adobe Experience Platform story .

Keep in mind that the best case studies are backed by data. That’s where Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform and Adobe Analytics come into play. With Real-Time CDP, you can gather the data you need to build a great case study and target specific customers to deliver the content to the right audience at the perfect moment.

Watch the Real-Time CDP overview video to learn more.

Finally, Adobe Analytics turns real-time data into real-time insights. It helps your business collect and synthesize data from multiple platforms to make more informed decisions and create the best case study possible.

Request a demo to learn more about Adobe Analytics.

https://business.adobe.com/blog/perspectives/b2b-ecommerce-10-case-studies-inspire-you

https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/business-case

https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/what-is-real-time-analytics

17 Brilliant Case Study Examples To Be Inspired By

Illustration Of Case Study Examples

Lead generation is complex, which means that your best bet is to have multiple touchpoints on different channels designed to capture as many leads as possible.

While you’re setting up your lead generation funnel , remember that you need to have different touchpoints on your site itself, too. It’s not enough, after all, that they’ve landed on your site on their own; you need to convince them to convert as a lead or even as a customer once they’re there.

Case studies can help with this, allowing you to prove what kind of results your brand, product, or service can offer to real clients. You can back up what you’re promising, and show the how, what, who, and why questions that customers may have. They can help generate more leads and accelerate revenue quickly.

We’ve got some great resources on how to get the information on how to conduct great case study interviews and what makes case studies valuable , but today we’re going to look at 17 individual and diverse case study examples and talk about how to write great B2B case studies.

These examples all do something exceptional and approach their case studies a little differently, but they all have outstanding final results. 

Ready to get inspired and get some actionable tips to write your own B2B case studies? Let’s get started.

How to Write Great B2B Case Studies 

Before we start looking at different B2B case study examples, we want to first talk about what makes B2B case studies valuable and effective.

What All Great B2B Case Studies Accomplish 

Case studies are most often used to build trust by proving that you’ve gotten a specific result for clients and that you can do the same for your existing leads. In many cases, case studies should:

  • Establish a persona or audience segment that the client fits into (which, in many cases, leads will relate to)
  • Explain what the client’s problem was before they started working with your brand
  • Detail what solution you offered to help the client (which should include some level of detail regarding the strategies, products, or tactics that you used)
  • Share the results, ideally the more specific (and numerical) the better; statistics that show improvements are golden 
  • Feature a client impact statement or a testimonial if possible 

You can use this as a guide post (or almost like a template) of how to get started with the content that you need to cover in your case study. 

B2B Case Study Best Practices 

When writing B2B case studies, you always want to follow these best practices:

  • Try to stick to a consistent template, that way as you create a fleshed-out case study section on your site, it will be scannable and familiar to leads 
  • Tell a story, using a client’s problems and pain points to connect with potential leads and highlighting how you can help; think of the problem as the beginning of the story, the solution as the climax, and the results section as the resolution of the story 
  • Be as detailed as you need to be, but as brief as possible; while B2B case studies can certainly trend much longer in length than most B2C case studies, you also want to make sure you’re offering value because if it goes too long, your customers will lose interest 
  • Always include hard facts. Statistics, tactical solutions, and quantifiable data reign supreme here. They carry a case study, and they give you a nice impressive title to draw in the clicks, too.
  • Rely on great formatting. Do not write a case study that’s nothing more than a giant block of text. Use great formatting to keep the entire case study scannable and easy to read. Break it up with visuals whenever possible. 

1. Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs has a number of content-based case studies on our site, and you know we had to feature these case studies first! 

These case studies both accomplish everything we’ve discussed above; they detail a client’s problem and pain points, explain the solution, and share the results and client testimonials. All the major boxes are checked.

What these case studies do differently than most, however, is they use a content-focused approach. The case studies aren’t just boasting about the amazing results our clients have seen, but they actually share enough actionable information for other clients to replicate their success, too. 

Let’s look at our case study, How to Reduce Your SLA by 99% . It discussed how a single client did reduce their SLA by 99%, but it also gives enough information that other users can discover how to use lead scoring to reduce SLA successfully themselves. 

The case study is downloadable, which a “Download” button at the top of the page next to “Request Demo” and “Start Free” CTAs. It also features a well-formatted “What you’ll learn” section to engage users and assure them that they won’t just be reading about a client story, but they’ll walk away with something helpful.

Case Study Examples: Breadcrumbs

One other thing to note here is that some B2B case studies can feel, for lack of a better word, a little cold. The client’s business name is mentioned, but pain points are relatively clinical and the tone is dull. That’s not the case with the Breadcrumbs case studies, where individual client contacts are referred to by first name and are written in a more conversational tone. It feels much more personal, and at the end of the day, we’re not just selling to businesses—we’re selling to the people who work for businesses. 

Case Study Examples: Breadcrumbs

2. AdEspresso

Want to turn your case study into a lead magnet? This case study example from AdEspresso is an excellent demonstration of how to use case studies not only to pique users’ but to actually convert them to leads.

Case Study Examples: Adespresso

Here’s how it works:

  • People go to the case study part of the site, find it through organic search, or are referred there by email, paid social ads, or blog posts
  • They read the title and the description, which mentions the company name, what was accomplished, a brief explanation of how (here, it’s split testing, targeting new and existing audiences, and AdEspresso)
  • The description gives a concrete result–“GlobeIn doubled its revenue”
  • They encourage users to download the PDF 

While most of the case studies that we’re looking at are published on their brands’ sites, this one works as a lead magnet. When users click the “Download PDF” CTA, they’re taken to a landing page with a lead form. 

Case Study Examples: Adespresso

The landing page touches more on what results were achieved, but still requires users to download the PDF to find out exactly which strategies were used. This works because the case study isn’t just stating “our tool gets more results,” it also offers strategic insights similar to a blog post that readers can leverage to improve their own campaigns. 

If you create case studies that get strategic and are heavily content-based instead of just sharing results, they can act as a different kind of touchpoint in the digital sales funnel .

3. Freshbooks

Most businesses have multiple different buyer personas and audience segments that they’re targeting at any given point in time. When you want your case studies to really be effective, publishing diverse content that really speaks to each of those segments is crucial.

Freshbooks ’ case study examples really showcase how you can do that well. Their case studies feature brief customer stories from “relatable” small businesses (aka not mega CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, who are not Freshbook’s core Facebook target audience) talking about how their business used the tools to benefit.

You can see the different personas represented here. One is an agency that wanted to scale quickly; one case study example featured a growing franchise. Another was for a small business that needed help with tax prep, and the last pictured here is a freelancer who uses the invoicing software’s time tracking features to measure productivity and assess rates. 

Case Study Examples: Freshbooks

These are four very different types of businesses, and it shows potential leads in each audience segment that there’s a reason they should use this tool. By highlighting different use cases, it can increase lead generation for all high-value audiences by appealing to their specific needs instead of just highlighting general stories that would appeal to all.

4. Disruptive Digital

Disruptive Digital is a paid social agency while a high-level holistic approach to advertising. Instead of looking at “general best practices” that you could find on ten other blogs in five seconds or less, they offer strategic insights that showcases how they really get their customers result. They make case study examples a central part of a large number of their blog posts.

Case Study Examples: Disruptive Digital

They’ll write a blog post about a high-level topic like “how to calculate your target ROAS,” and then show a case study with real client data to walk you through the process. This is more powerful than hypotheticals when you’re talking about data-driven PPC campaigns, and they always use it to back up their arguments as well as teach a strategy. 

While these case study examples aren’t on a dedicated landing page, they work by appealing to users more towards the top of the funnel . It helps to build trust and establish credibility early while setting their blog posts apart. It’s good for their content marketing and lead generation efforts. 

5. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a well-known SaaS content and social media planning and organization tool, and their case studies are phenomenal. 

They do a few things well. The first is by featuring different types of clients in their case studies. In the case study example below, they’re showcasing not a brand, but a University alumni group. 

Their formatting is also great. The first thing you see is “This 5-Person Marketing Team Managed 12x More Work While Working Remotely” in bright blue across the top of the page. They’ve also got a quick-reference, quick-facts bar on the side of the case study that lists the brand name, the brand’s site, the industry, company size, and marketing team size. Here, you can download a PDF of the case study, and immediately under there is a CTA to request a demo (also in blue, ideally to have the eye go from the headline to the CTA).

Case Study Examples: Coschedule

The case study itself is well written, and you can read the full study here . It breaks things down by sharing the challenge, the solution, and the results. As you can see below, they have a graph in bright colors to showcase exactly how impactful those results were, with the results in bolded text underneath it. They finish it off with a quote from a key team member to really drive it home.

Case Study Examples: Coschedule

As far as case study examples go, this one is pretty perfect. The design is excellent, with quick-reference data, important facts highlighted, great design elements to draw the users’ eye and attention where you want it, and a customer quote. They also have a strong CTA to get in touch, which can get the process moving quickly, or the option to download the case study (turning it into valuable content and a lead magnet) if the customer chooses.

6. ONESOURCE

ONESOURCE  is a tax preparation product from Thomas Reuter’s, and the site features the below case study of The Cheesecake Factory—a major American brand—to help showcase value and generate sales. 

Case Study Examples: Onesource

As far as design goes, this case study is clean, organized, and condensed. It’s like a digital brochure, with all the information cleanly broken down into bullet points, key quotes and statements, and subheadings. 

They share only the core information that’s needed (including what products were used, what was accomplished, and data about the Cheesecake factory’s tax department) and nothing that isn’t. It’s to the point and highly effective.

Slack is one of the most popular instant communication chat tools available right now, and especially after everyone had to work from home during the pandemic, we’re guessing a large number of readers are familiar with the platform.

Their case studies are, as you’d expect, strong and well-written. They’re longer and read almost more like a story-driven blog post than studies like CoSchedule’s fast-facts, brief-and-to-the-point content. But this works for this brand; storytelling is powerful, after all, and it’s memorable and relatable.

Case Study Examples: Slack

In this case study, they use storytelling to really highlight the company’s pain points, focusing on how shopping habits changed and impacted businesses during COVID-19. They focus on Shipt, a grocery-delivery company that was thrust into high demand quickly. 

The case study talked about how Shipt had been using Slack for years, but how they really embraced advanced features and integrations during COVID to get the most out of the platform. They then share how the company uses it, and share data and statistics about usage . 

There’s a quote from the director of IT in there, too, to stress the importance, and you’ll see they have a “quick facts” tab on the side with a powerful quote that highlights the value, key integrations that were featured, and a CTA to both contact the sales team and to try Slack for free. 

Case Study Examples: Slack

They have a full page of case studies available, all of which state what Slack helped accomplish in a storytelling format as opposed to going hard with the data upfront. This feels more casual, but is just as powerful.

8. Culture Amp

We’re going meta. We just looked at case study examples from Slack, and now we’re going to look at a case study example about Slack. 

Culture Amp helps brands maintain and facilitate their desired communication culture through feedback and communication response.

Case Study Examples: Cultureamp

This case study features my favorite quick facts tab, sharing the brand name featured in the case study, a sentence each about the challenge, solution, and result. And there is, of course, that “request demo” CTA. 

The case study does a few things that you don’t see a lot. They introduce two of the key figures in the Slack department who worked directly with Culture Amp, giving it a more personal touch and adding more credibility to the study.

It’s also well-written and engaging to read. Sentences like “Company culture is Slack’s North Star” aren’t your standard technical and almost clinical “just the facts, ma’am” approach to case studies. The case study is longer than some others, but the creative writing can keep you hooked, and it thoroughly explains how the single brand used the product and services to excel.

9. KlientBoost 

We’ve already looked at one case study from a marketing agency, but the way KlientBoost has their case studies set up, it’s well worth taking a look at another.

Their numerous case studies are found under the “Results” tab on their site, making them all readily visible and easy to locate. It also increases the odds that users will stumble across the case studies on their own, even if they weren’t intentionally looking for them.

And one thing worth noting: They’ve got a sorting feature to “show me clients who” meet certain qualities like “are worth billions, “got acquired,” “have small budgets,” and “have crazy complex offerings.” 

This is an easy way to tell all of their potential clients that “yes, we take clients like you and get results!” while making it simple for them to find proof. 

Case Study Examples: Klientboost

The case study itself is of course well-written and designed, too. You’ve got a bold, color-contrasting header at the top in large text that lays out core benefits (x results in just three months), with more detailed results visible on the side.

Case Study Examples: Klientboost

They also break down the different advanced advertising features they used, a customer quote, and an image of what the ads looked like to bring the whole thing together. This shows prospective clients exactly what they can expect when working with the agency, and it builds a massive amount of trust. 

10. Omnivore 

Omnivore.io is a menu management tool designed specifically for restaurants that integrate with other tools to streamline the guest experience.

The content we’re going to look at is a great example of case study creation for hyper-niche industries that have specific needs. 

It’s presented as a standard blog post, but the H1 title says exactly what benefits the company achieved, and they still have a “more seating options, more problems” header to present the challenge in a creative way. 

Case Study Examples: Omnivore

They then explain how the TableUp app works with Omnivore’s tech and other integrations to be able to offer additional services to customers like adding their party to a restaurant’s waitlist, joining email lists for points, making to-go orders, and more. 

Case Study Examples: Omnivore

They also shared an example of how a real client (Budweiser) used the feature, and included a blurb about the integrating tool. 

You’ll notice that this case study looks a little different from others that we’ve looked at. It doesn’t have a lot of hard numbers or super detailed examples, but it works because it showcases a specific integration and details specific uses. 

This is, in many cases, going to be an audience focused on use case value more than just statistics; if the tool can do what’s needed, that’s what they’re going to care most about. So this formatting works. 

11. Pepperi

We’re on a food-themed case study roll right now! Next, we’re going to look at a case study of how Chex Finer Foods worked with the Pepperi omnichannel B2B Commerce. 

This case study is long . It’s much longer than the others that we’re looking at, with 6 total pages of content (though some are heavily dominated by images). See the entire case study by clicking above. 

Here’s why it works though: They keep the “Challenges” brief and the client breakdown visible right upfront to show users why they should care. 

Case Study Examples: Pepperi

The solutions section is also brief, explaining how Pepperi solved the company’s challenges. That all happens within the first page of the case study. 

Case Study Examples: Pepperi

The rest of the study has five pages that look like this, showing visuals that highlight the exact product that users received when working with Pepperi. There’s no hypothetical mock-up; you get to see the mobile app, the site, the home page here. Other pages show how search results work for brands with extensive inventories, along with features like analytics, multi-product views, and more. 

Case Study Examples: Pepperi

For customers who really want to understand what they’re getting and why they should choose this particular service, there’s no doubt. They can see what the interface looks like, and what real clients’ platforms offer. 

12. DOTVOX 

DOTVOX sells hosted VoIP business lines to their clients.

There are a few reasons I really liked this particular case study.

First, they do a great job showcasing how their specific technology can benefit a specific type of client: a multi-site company that needs help with business communications. This is niche enough that some other tools may not be able to help (or that may be a concern that some customers have). 

Case Study Examples Dotvox

They also focused the case study on a business in the financial industry, letting other clients in that niche know that they offer secure communication options suited for banks, mortgage lenders, and more. These are high-value clients, so it’s a solid choice. 

Later on in the case study, they break down the individual results, services, and solutions achieved. The “Feature-rich” part is my favorite; they detail unique features that other tools may not offer and explain briefly how they work. 

Case Study Examples: Dotvox

Potential leads reading this can get a good idea of what’s possible. 

13. PortaFab 

Last but not least, we’ve got this case study from PortaFab . 

The reason I really wanted to look at this particular case study is that it’s not selling a service or a SaaS tool; it’s a physical product being sold to businesses. That automatically changes things up a bit. 

They, of course, have a brief overview of what the project entailed, but it’s organized a bit differently. They featured the challenge on the right side of the case study and the project overview and benefits provided on the left. 

Case Study Examples: Portafab

Underneath this, however, they’ve got their solution featured, along with an extensive photo gallery showing the finished project. 

Case Study Examples: Portafab

Allowing customers to easily visualize the end result is important for physical goods, so this was a smart call. 

14. Strands Retail

Strands Retail sells personalization and product recommendation software to eCommerce brands. Their case study below features the work they did for mega-brand Chewy.

Case Study Examples: Strands Retail

Featuring this particular client was smart. Chewy is highly regarded for the exceptional customer service experiences they provide, so linking themselves to the brand is a good move. It’s also a massive company, and since the case study focuses on the fact that Chewy needed a solution that scaled with their brand, it gives them outstanding credibility in terms of the potential to serve enterprise-grade clients.

The case study is visually solid and well-designed, too. Since not all leads want to read the details and just want a few quick stats, featuring a few impressive key stats at the top in contrasting colors or with graphics (which they do here) can get the point across quickly and really exemplify how beneficial the product was. 

15. Codeless.io 

Like Breadcrumbs, Codeless.io takes a content-heavy approach to the case studies they feature on their site. 

They don’t just want to show results (which are crucial for a content marketing agency to do in order to leverage trust), but they want to prove that it wasn’t just luck. They got their clients real, sustainable results with careful processes, and they can do the same for you, too. 

Let’s look at an example. Their Loomly case study boasts an impressive 827% increase in CTR by updating the client’s existing content. This is smart, because it highlights a service many agencies may not offer and demonstrates the value of the service to clients who may be reluctant to spend on updating existing content. 

The case study itself is written and formatted almost like a blog post and case study hybrid. You’ve got the essential details about the company listed off to the side, but there’s also an entire H2 section that details more about the business in question. 

Case Study Examples: Codeless.io

They also are incredibly transparent in the processes they used to help their client obtain impressive results, and this is something you won’t see many agencies do because they don’t want to “give away their secrets.” This builds trust, however, because clients can see that there is an actual strategy and that the company can help them, too. Everyone walks away from the case study without a doubt that Codeless was responsible for these results, not luck. 

Case Study Examples: Codeless.io

16. WizeHire 

WizeHire is a hiring platform that helps businesses find the types of applicants they’re looking for, and their case studies do an outstanding job showcasing exactly how their products work and how they impact clients.

This case study , in particular—which features their client over at Mazda—is a great case study example to look at.

Their formatting is a little different than some of the others on this list, but it’s still undeniably effective. Towards the top of the case study, they have a “How We Helped” section. It introduces the point of contact, the client’s past pain points, and basic “before and after” points to highlight the value of the tool. This is a great quick overview to introduce readers to high-value concepts quickly. 

Case Study Examples: Wizehire

They also use multiple media here, including images, video, and diverse text formatting. This makes the case study visually appealing and more engaging. If you want to just skim quickly through bullet points you can, but there’s also a video where the client raves about their experience.

And, of course, you’ve got a detailed results section highlighting how the client received long-term value from the product, featuring great statistics and a strong client testimonial. 

Case Study Examples: Wixehire

Kosli is a highly technical tool for software developers and dev ops teams, and their case studies are a great example of how to discuss extraordinarily technical topics in an approachable way.  

Let’s look at this case study , which promotes how their client Firi delivered over 100,000 changes without worrying about compliance. The case study itself is relatively short, but that’s okay, because it doesn’t need to be long to be effective.

It efficiently stresses that Firi operates in Norway, which has some of the most demanding sets of regulatory standards across the globe. That automatically assures customers that no matter where they’re based, this tool can help, making this client selection for the case study a great choice. They also explain the value upfront—100,000 changes and a proven audit trail if needed. 

Case Study Examples: Kosli

The formatting of this case study is smart, cleanly listing common challenges and then solutions. They had a “counterpart” solution, if you will, for each challenge listed, showing how they were able to help the client directly. 

Case Study Examples: Kosli

And while there isn’t a long list of statistics or improved performance in this case study, that’s okay, too; not every case study absolutely needs that. Instead, they have an explanation from their client (a CTO of the company), who explained why the software was so invaluable for their needs. 

Case Study Examples: Kosli

Final Thoughts

Case studies can be powerful tools used to generate and convert leads, boosting your overall revenue. And as you can see above, there’s no one-size-fits-all requirement for what an effective case study looks like or even where it should appear on your website . Take some time to think about what information you want to present and how it would be most effectively portrayed to your leads. This is a good starting point, and make sure to remember to get your design team’s input, too, so it looks and reads well. 

Ready to get more conversions from the case studies you’re creating? Make sure your sales team is ready to nurture incoming leads with lead scoring! Book your free demo of Breadcrumbs today.

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The 22 Best Case Study Examples That Boost Sales (+ Templates and Tips)

Jackie Jacobson

Jackie Jacobson | June 29, 2023 | Case Studies | 20 min read

Quick Links

  • 1.   What Is It?
  • 2.   Why They're Important
  • 3.   Case Study Length
  • 4.   Where Do I Put Them?
  • 5.   Case Study Format
  • 6.   How to Write One
  • 7.   Examples
  • a.   PDF
  • b.   Online

The Best Case Study Examples

  • 1.  Adobe: Royal Bank of Scotland
  • 2.  BrightEdge: Stanley
  • 3.  LeadGnome: Host Analytics
  • 4.  Bitly: Vissla
  • 5.  Taboola: The Line
  • 6.  OutBrain: Lane Bryant
  • 7.  Google Analytics: Optimizely
  • 8.  LinkedIn: HubSpot
  • 9.  LevelEleven: Staples
  • 10.  Life Size: Rackspace
  • 11.  Five9: Weed Man
  • 12.  LogMeIn: Extent Technologies
  • 13.  Red Hat: North Carolina State Websites
  • 14.  VMWare: CenturyLink
  • 15.  HPE: Mendix
  • 16.  Gravitate: Global Expeditions Group
  • 17.  IDEO: INFARM
  • 18.  Forge and Smith: Happy Planet
  • 19.  CoSchedule: English Heritage
  • 20.  Slack: OpenAI
  • 21.  Square: The Epicurean Trader
  • 22.  Bluleadz: BandGrip

Building an effective content marketing strategy that can take your prospects through every stage of the buyer's journey means creating a variety of content.

From relevant, informative blog content to engaging webpages, landing pages, whitepapers, and emails, a comprehensive content marketing strategy should run deep.

One powerful, but often underused, piece of content is the case study .

What Is a Case Study?

A case study acts a narrative, featuring real-world situations where certain products or services are used in a way that demonstrates their value. They are a special type of thought leadership content that brands can use in marketing and sales to guide their target audience to the decision stage of their buyer's journey . Engaging case studies walk prospects through how a real life customer identified a specific pain point , started using your product or service, and overcame that pain point while reaping additional benefits.

A case study is a unique type of thought leadership content that tells a story.

Case studies are narratives that feature real world situations or uses of products or services to demonstrate their value. A well written case study will follow a customer as they define a problem, determine a solution, implement it, and reap the benefits.

Case studies offer readers the ability to see a situation from the customer's perspective from beginning to end. 

Need an example of a case study? Check out some of our case studies here !

Why case studies are important.

A marketing case study is one of the most compelling content items in your sales funnel .

It’s the perfect way to guide people into and through the decision phase, when they have the best options laid out on the table and they’re ready to puzzle through that final selection.

Because of this, case studies are uniquely useful as bottom of the funnel content .

case studies are bottom of the funnel content

By the time prospects are ready to read case studies, they have a nuanced grasp of the problem in front of them. They also have a good selection of potential solutions and vendors to choose from.

There may be more than one option that’s suitable for a given situation. In fact, there usually is. But there’s just one option that fits the prospect best. The challenge is figuring out which one.

Since B2B decision makers aren’t mind readers, they need content to bridge the gap between “what they know about your solution” and “what they know about their own business.” The case study does that by showing how a similar customer succeeded.

The more similar the prospect is to the customer in the case study, the more striking it will be.

For that reason, you might want to have a case study for every buyer persona you serve. And naturally, case studies pertain to specific products or services, not your whole brand.

So, you could find yourself with multiple case studies for each buyer type.

However, the effort is worth it, since case studies have a direct impact on sales figures.

bofu-fill-pipeline

How Long Should a Case Study Be?

Honestly, the more to-the-point you can be in a case study, the better.

Great case studies should pack a lot of meaning into a small space. In the best examples, your reader can grasp the single main idea of each page in a short paragraph or two.

Each detail should build on the next, so they’ll keep moving forward until the end without getting distracted.

Sure, it’s no Dan Brown novel, but if you do it right, it’ll still be a real page-turner.

Note: Some businesses will have a brief case study in PDF form to use as sales collateral then a longer form, more in-depth version of the same case study on their website. In this case, it can be normal to write a lengthier case study.

Where Should I Put My Case Studies?

Anywhere you want, really!

Ideally, you should upload case studies somewhere on your website so new leads coming to your site have the opportunity to see just how kickass your business is at driving revenue and results for your current customers.

Whether it's an online case study or a PDF version, making your successes available to the public can prove just how valuable your efforts are.

Plus, make sure every member of your sales team has access to your case studies so they can use them as sales collateral to send to prospects and opportunities! A quick PDF attachment to a sales email can be very convincing.

It can also help to sprinkle links and CTAs to your case studies throughout your content:

Get Free Case Study Templates

The Best Case Study Format

  • Introduction: Provide context for the story.
  • Challenge: Describe the primary issue being faced.
  • Solution: Identify the product or service being used.
  • Benefit: Emphasize the most impactful advantages.
  • Result: Detail the specific outcomes the customer earned.

Like press releases, case studies often fall into a certain specific format.

While it’s not required that you have all of the possible topics in a particular order, picking a consistent format will help you accelerate production down the road. It also makes your content easier to read.

Many B2B businesses use the following approach:

  • Introduction: sets the stage by providing context for the situation.
  • Challenge: discusses the key problem that the customer was facing.
  • Solution: a basic overview of the product or service the customer used.
  • Benefit: recaps the solution’s top advantages – why it was the right choice.
  • Result: the positive business outcome arising from the solution and benefits.

This formula gives you enough flexibility to highlight what’s most important about your enterprise, solution, and the customer you’re showcasing.

At the same time, it ensures that your team will know exactly what information they need to compile to design case studies in the future.

It also serves as an intuitive trail of breadcrumbs for your intended reader.

How to Write a Case Study

writing-case-study

1. Ask Your Client/Customer for Approval.

This first step is crucial because it sets the layout for your entire case study. 

If your client or customer gives the ok to use their name and information, then you can add as much detail as you want to highlight who they are, what you helped them do, and the results it had.

But, if they would rather remain anonymous or want you to leave out any specific details, you’ll have to find a way to keep your information more generalized while still explaining the impact of your efforts.

2. Gather Your Information.

Like any good story, a marketing case study has a beginning, middle, and end. Or, you could think of it as “before, during, and after.”

Before: The Problem

Your case study will always open by presenting a problem suffered by one of your clients.

This part of the study establishes what’s at stake and introduces the characters – your company, the client company, and whichever individual decision makers speak for each side.

During: The Solution

Once you define the problem, the next step presents your offering, which serves as the answer to the dilemma.

Your product or service is, in a very real sense, the hero of the story. It catalyzes the change, which you describe in terms of your features, advantages, and other differentiators.

After: The Result

In the final step, you discuss the “happy ending” brought about by your solution.

Returning to the “stakes” you established at the very start, you expand on how much better things are thanks to your intervention. You want prospects to imagine themselves enjoying that level of success.

3. Get a Quote.

Of course, a study about two corporations isn’t very interesting on its own. The best case studies personify the protagonists, including the vendor and the client company, by having plenty of quotes peppered throughout the entire story.

Naturally, the business problem to be solved is the big, bad villain here, so you want the client (and preferably, your own team as well) to weigh in on that problem: How complex it is, what solving it would mean, and what not solving it would cost.

Then, as the situation turns around, testimonials become essential.

Naturally, the longest, most emphatic testimonial should come from the top decision maker. But you should aim to include a glowing quote from many different stakeholders – representing the full cast of “characters” who might be making consensus buying decisions around your solution.

Note: Don’t use a testimonial or quote if your case study is anonymous. 

4. Find Some Compelling Graphics.

A case study isn’t a whitepaper: You shouldn’t be trudging through page after page of text.

In fact, some of the most powerful case studies establish their own vivid, graphics-heavy style – looking a lot more like an infographic, or even a magazine, than traditional B2B marketing collateral.

Color blocks , strong contrasts, skyscraper photography, and hero shots are all on the table when it comes to case studies. The more data you have to convey, the more creative you should be in presenting it so it can be understood at a glance. 

15 Great Examples of Offline Case Studies

1. adobe: royal bank of scotland.

adobe-case-study

This study focuses on the solutions Adobe provided for the Royal Bank of Scotland. Their top challenges included fostering a culture of data driven decision making, eliminating disjointed systems, and delivering digital experiences that are relevant and easy to use.

Adobe's approach resulted in a 20 percent increase in conversion, as well as improved internal communications, faster optimization, and a reduction of their content management footprint. 

2. BrightEdge: Stanley

In 2015, Stanley consolidated two separate brand web properties into one site. The process needed to mitigate traffic disruption, improve traffic, and increase organic search results.

The results? Almost 40 percent of keywords Stanley ranked for were on the first page of organic results, and the company generated a 100 percent lift in revenue, thanks to support from the BrightEdge platform.

3. LeadGnome: Host Analytics

leadgnome-case-study

Host Analytics moved to an account based marketing strategy in 2015. They noticed that the marketing efforts were limited by a large number of low quality needs.

Their problem was solved when they used an automated email marketing approach from LeadGnome to nurture and qualify leads via email marketing.

4. Bitly: Vissla

Vissla is an online ecommerce company with a need to understand big data across multiple marketing platforms.

Bitly provided a a way to consolidate data and literally link channels together to display all information on a single dashboard.

5. Taboola: The Line

taboola-case-study

The Line is an online boutique that offers shoppers a unique experience and showcases products that can be found at their brick and mortar store in NYC's Soho neighborhood. Their goal was to increase first time visitors to their site.

Taboola offers a product that drives first time users. The result? Over 72 million impressions within three months, and email subscriber growth of 12 percent.

6. OutBrain: Lane Bryant

Lane Bryant, the leading retailer for women sized 14 – 28, launched a campaign designed to celebrate all women and redefine the traditional notion of sexy with a simple message – ALL women are sexy.

The goal was to amplify the campaign and drive traffic and engagement.

The result? OutBrain used media amplification to take the campaign viral, resulting in over 48,500,000 impressions in just two weeks!

case-study-template-inline-cta

7. Google Analytics: Optimizely

optimizely-case-study

Optimizely is a leading online A/B testing and user experience optimization platform that offers innovative data-driven marketing solutions to maximize user experience and keep them coming back for more. 

The challenge they faced was better identifying page views to determine where customers are in the buying cycle.

The solution was provided by using data from Google Analytics Premium to successfully move leads through the sales funnel.

8. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions: HubSpot

HubSpot, in search of quality leads, turned to LinkedIn Marketing Solutions to engage with marketing professionals in small to medium sized businesses, targeting them with ebooks, webinars, and how-to guides. Sponsored organic content appeared in members' LinkedIn feeds.

The result: 400 percent more leads within their target audience than efforts on other platforms.

9. LevelEleven: Staples

leveleleven-case-study

LevelEleven helped Staples focus their teams on the critical sales activities that matter.

The end result? Their team developed a better understanding of the KPIs that matter and experienced a 182 percent increase in key selling activities.

10. LifeSize: Rackspace

Rackspace is a world leader in hybrid cloud computing with offices throughout the world. The challenge was collaborating and communicating across offices.

The approach? LifeSize created a video solution to build stronger relationships across international offices.

11. Five9: Weed Man

weedman-case-study

Five years ago, the lawn care company Weed Man had an idea -- If their phone-based reps could connect with more prospects, more decisions would result, without adding sales reps.

The solution? Five9 assisted Weed Man with migrating their data to the cloud. This case study shows why SMBs like Weed Man should store business data on the cloud for CRM.

12. LogMeIn: Extent Technologies

One of the better, more concise case study examples, this one page synopsis clearly defines the challenges and goals of Extent.

It explores how LogMeIn provided effective solutions and produced stellar results, including a boost in staff productivity, an increase in first contact resolution rate, and an improvement in overall service. 

13. Red Hat: North Carolina State Websites

redhat-case-study

Under mandate from the governor, the North Carolina Department of Information Technology needed to update state websites to overcome complex processes and limited technical resources.

The resulting solutions from Red Hat reduced maintenance times and lowered staffing costs.

14. VMWare: CenturyLink

This study addresses the complexities of cloud hosted infrastructure. One element of all case study examples is to educate perspective clients about the services and products offered.

This study takes a complex subject and makes it easy to understand, while clearly outlining the solutions VMWare can provide.

15. Hewlett Packard Enterprise: Mendix

hewlett-packard-case-study

This study breaks down another complex subject: rapid hosted cloud app development.

HPE links to additional content so readers can gain even more knowledge about the subject and the solutions HPE offers.

7 of the Best Online Case Studies

1. gravitate: global expeditions group.

Gravitate case study

This case study is a great example of how to break up a detailed case study for an easier read.

Gravitate starts off by introducing their client, Global Expeditions Group (GXG), to give visitors a little background into what they do. They then dive straight into what their role was in helping GXG with a robust content marketing strategy.

What catches your eye at the beginning of this case study is the results. Rather than forcing readers to find out the impact of their efforts at the very end, they call out some major statistics and improvements that they helped GXG achieve. It's a great way to entice readers to keep them wanting to learn just how they did it.

Gravitate did a great job breaking up their rather long case study. Since it focuses on an entire content marketing strategy, they put various parts of their case study into separate sections, from their rebranding efforts to their website design and copywriting.

2. IDEO: INFARM

What we like so much about IDEO's case study about INFARM is that it reads just like a simple blog post – there's no sections and no busy graphics. While this doesn't work for everyone, it really matches the vibe of IDEO's brand.

This case study is short, sweet, and to the point, with the largest elements on the page being the images and a quote. At the very top, they outline the entire case study in two small sections – the challenge and the outcome.

What we like about this particular case study is how IDEO talks about what's next for INFARM. Beyond the typical problem-solution-result structure, they took it one step further to talk about the future and what INFARM plans on doing next. 

3. Forge and Smith: Happy Planet

Forge and Smith Happy Planet Case Study

Forge and Smith effectively uses real mockups and examples from the work they did for Happy Planet to showcase their work in action.

This case study is perfectly designed into multiple modules to break up chunks of text into three phases. They start off with the objectives they set in place for their website design and development work for Happy Planet, which is pretty unique for a case study.

What's great about this case study is the opportunity to view the finished website. A hyperlink isn't just hidden within the text forcing you to dig around looking for it; it's called out right then and there to let you view their finished work on the Happy Planet website.

Another great feature is the option to view a previous case study or all the case studies if you're interested. No need to locate the main page, you have direct access! 

forge and smith related case studies

4. CoSchedule: English Heritage

CoSchedule treats their case studies as customer stories, highlighting who their customers are and how their platform was able to help them. Their case study on English Heritage is simple to view and comprehend.

On the left, there is a customer spotlight on English Heritage, complete with a company logo, brief description, industry, company size, size of the marketing team, and more. These little details help give you a better idea of who the company is.

Then, on the right side of the screen, is a blog-like case study.

Rather than breaking up their message into the standard format, CoSchedule calls out the results that English Heritage has seen since switching to CoSchedule. Within each result, they touch on the challenge they had before CoSchedule then the lasting impact it created.

Throughout the case study, CoSchedule includes relevant screenshots and impactful quotes from English Heritage employees. This helps readers visualize what they are talking about.

5. Slack: OpenAI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools have quickly claimed center stage in the digital world. Slack is one business that hopped on the bandwagon and incorporated AI generated assistance into their platform, and this case study tells a story of success using modern technology.

In this case study , Slack relies heavily on testimonials to share the impact that OpenAI has made on their product. The story of Slack and OpenAI is told directly to readers by the people who experienced the partnership and how it can improve user experience for all kinds of businesses. Sharing a success story in this way makes the whole case study feel much more personal than just providing a list of statistics. 

When customers read through the case study, they'll get to know perspectives from multiple people, hopefully coming across one that really resonates with them. 

6. Square: The Epicurean Trader

The Epicurean Trader case study featured on the Square website follows the tried and true structure for a closer look into a success story. First, this case study introduces The Epicurean Trader and what problems they were facing as a retail business. 

The next section of the case study discusses the solution proposed by Square and the implementation of their products as The Epicurean Trader expanded their business. Finally, this case study concludes with notable impacts as a result of using Square's software, including revenue growth and comparisons to standards set within the industry. 

Reading through this case study, you'll join The Epicurean Trade on their journey to enhance their retail practices. Thanks to testimonials from the owner of the business, you'll also get an inside look at how this brand was able to grow with some help from Square. 

Overall, this case study example is clear, concise, and easy to follow. Readers will get to know a highlighted business and how Square stepped in to resolve a problem they were facing. 

7. Bluleadz: BandGrip

BZ-BandGrip case study

We couldn't  not pat our own backs for recently publishing a case studies page on our website.

Bluleadz often uses case study PDFs as sales collateral to send to qualified prospects. While we used these PDF designs internally, we wanted to make sure our client success stories were available to everyone coming to our site.

Thus, our case study page was born.

Our BandGrip case study really sticks out to us. We start off by introducing who BandGrip is, who they serve, and what they do.

Then, we highlight the struggles they were having with getting demo sign-ups on their page. We included relevant quotes from the CEO to show their need for a solution.

We then begin to outline all the pre-show and post-show tactics that we implemented to help them tackle their challenge and earn them more demo sign ups. Landing page screenshots and other various graphics help readers visualize what we were able to do.

Toward the end of the case study, we highlight the impact of our efforts, calling out some of the major statistics. 

Highlight Your Past Successes to Attract Future Business

Each of these case study examples does an excellent job of outlining the challenges, solutions, and results provided. If you are building a portfolio of case studies, use these excellent examples for inspiration and format.

Once you master the art of the case study, you’ll find it’s packed with marketing power, giving you a huge ROI for the time you put into creating it.

If your leads have been falling off in the decision phase, a marketing case study may be just what you need.

Case studies are a powerful tool in your content marketing arsenal, so why not create one today? Click below to create your very own case study!

click here to download the offer

General FAQ

What is a case study.

Case studies are narratives that feature real-world situations or uses of products or services to demonstrate their value. A well-written case study will follow a customer as they define a problem, determine a solution, implement it, and reap the benefits.

The more to-the-point you can be in a case study, the better. Case Studies typically range from 500 words to 1,500 words depending on what's getting highlighted.

What Format Should My Case Study Be In?

Typically, a case study contains an introduction, a challenge, a solution, a benefit, and a result.

Why are Case Studies Important?

Case studies allow businesses to showcase how their product or service has been implemented successfully by their customers. It allows businesses to show how their product/service is actually used and the impact that it can have.

Jackie Jacobson

Jackie Jacobson

Jackie is a Copywriter at Bluleadz. She graduated from Elon University with a degree in Creative Writing and is currently living in Charlotte, NC. If you need her, you can find her exploring the city or relaxing with a good book.

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Top 22 Stunning UX Case Studies You Should Know in 2022

An immersive yet well-structured UX case study helps UX professionals show off their design talents in portfolio websites, and let them communicate better with employers, designers and others easily.

However, as a UX designer , how can you write a perfect UX case study to easily get hired or communicate with others better?

Mockplus has handpicked 22 of the best UX design case study examples in 2022 to help you get inspiration, improve your portfolios and make your own things with ease. A step-by-step guideline about how to create a UX case study is also followed.

What is a UX case study?

A UX case study tells the story of how you create a great website or app and, in particular, what you do to improve the UX of the site. UX designers—newbies and experts alike—will often share a case study on a portfolio website as a great way to get hired. Just like sending a resumé. 

So, it is a lot more than just a copy of everything you've done while designing the project. To really showcase your design talent and the breadth of your abilities, you need to make sure the following are all included:

  • A full description of your role in the project;
  • The biggest challenges you've faced;
  • The solutions you've chosen, how you chose them and why;
  • How you communicate and collaborate with others; and
  • The outcomes and the lessons you’ve learned.  

To this, you should feel free to add any further information that you think would help you stand out from the crowd. 

UX Case Study Example

It is also worth remembering that UX case studies are a good resource for UX design beginners to learn more practical design skills and to gain from the real experience of others in dealing deal with difficult or urgent problems.

22 Best UX case study examp le s you should learn

Whatever stage you’re at and whatever you are writing your case study for, these 22 top examples are bound to inspire you. 

1. Perfect Recipe -UX design for cooking and shopping

Perfect Recipe

Designer s : Marina Yalanska and Vlad Taran

Case Study : Perfect Recipe

This is a mobile application that enables users to search for food recipes and to buy what they need to cook different dishes.

Why d id  we choose this  one?

This case study illustrates the entire UX design process is very simple, plain language. Many aspects of the process are included, along with some really inspirational ideas, such as product personalization, challenges and solutions, animated interactions, and other interface details.

Extra tips :

This example is from the Tubikstudio blog, which is very popular among designers. It regularly shares different branding, UI, and UX case studies. We would strongly recommend that you follow this blog to keep yourself up to date with the latest and most creative case studies.

View details

2. GnO Well Being - Branding, Web Desing & UX

GnO Well Being

Designer : Marina Yalanska and Olga Zakharyan

Case Study : GnO Well Being

This is a creative illustration website that presents and sells a weighted designer blanket that helps you get a good night’s sleep, the first step to good health and a better life.

Why d id  we choose this ?

This example is so much more than a great UX case study. In addition to the UX design , it gives you insight into many more key design issues, such as the logo, custom graphics, website pages, interactions and so on. There are many ideas here that you could copy for your own projects.

3. Splitwiser - UI/UX case redesign

Splitwiser

Designer : Chethan KVS (a Product designer at Unacademy)

Case Study : Splitwise

This is a concept mobile app that enables users to track and split expenses with friends. The designer has also given it another name, "Splitwise." 

Why do we choose this ?

This case study shares the designer's insights into key design decisions, such as why he chose this product, why he decided to redesign the logo, how to improve the onboarding and other pages, how to optimize the user flow, how to balance all pages and functions, how to enhance UX through bottom bars, interactions, gestures, view modes, and more.

Everything is explained using intuitive images, earning it thousands of “likes”. This is a great example that is bound to help you write a stunning case study on redesigning UX.

This comes from a popular media channel called "UX Planet" that regularly posts examples of the best and latest UX case studies from around the world. Another great place to keep you up to speed with the latest UX designs.

4. Deeplyapp.com - UX & visual improvements

Deeplyapp.com

Designer : Sladana Kozar

Case Study : Deeplyapp

This is a health and self-care website app that helps users maintain mental well-being with meditations and exercises. This case study talks you through the design process of creating a user-friendly mobile app.

This case study focuses on improvements to the UX and visual features of this mobile app. Many aspects are included to help you understand it better, such as the design background, what to build, UI flow diagram, discoverability design, visual balance, and much more. A full set of app interfaces are presented for you to study as well.

You can also check out its Part 1 post for more details.

5. Talent Envoy - improving the recruitment process 

Talent Envoy

Designer : Enes Aktaş (Experienced UX designer)

Case Study : Talent Envoy

Talent Envoy is an intelligent job assistant that helps users find their ideal job and get to all the way to signing a contract faster and more easily.

This case study firstly points out the biggest challenges and problems faced by job-seekers—the shortage of US recruitment markets. It then talks to you through the detail of how the designers optimized the recruitment process. You will also find information on the user research process, the UI flowchart design, the related wireframe and Sketch designs, the main page design, and more. 

All the details have clear explanations and they offer a great example of how to use user research to solve problems and improve UI interfaces.

This one comes from another hot media channel called "Muzli" which shares the latest ideas, designs, and interactions about websites or website apps from all over the world. Don’t miss out on this site if you want to stay ahead of the curve. 

6. My Car Parking - UI/UX case study

My Car Parking

Designer : Johny Vino (Experienced UX and interaction designer)

Case Study : My Car Parking

This is a mobile app that can help people get parking slots easily even when they travel beyond their normal routes. 

This is a masterclass in how to write a case study that is simple, well-structured, and easy to understand. Many intuitive lists and images are used to explain the design ideas and processes. 

It has received “claps” from over seven and a half thousand people and   is a perfect example of how to write a well-structured and easy-to-understand case study.

7. Parking Finder App - UI/UX case study

Parking Finder App

Designer : Soumitro Sobuj

Case Study : Parking Finder App

This is another concept mobile app that makes it easy for users to find parking slots even in big or overcrowded cities.

This case study is beautifully presented and gives a good presentation of the whole design process. It covers nearly all the issues that a textbook UX case study should have, such as problems and solutions, user-centered design, design strategy, user flow, information architecture , interface wireframes and visual designs, and much more besides. 

It is one of the best examples we have found of a case study that really teaches you how to write the perfect UX case study.

8. Pasion Del Cielo - coffee ordering experience

Pasióon dDel Cielo

Designer : Jonathan Montalvo (Senior Designer, Branding, UXUI )

Case Study : Pasión del Cielo

This is a concept project about a real local coffee shop in Miami.

This case study demonstrates effective ways to engage users with the Pasión brand and how a site can make it as easy as possible to turn page views into coffee sales. 

There is a lot of analysis included to explain the entire design process, such as analyzing the competition, feature analysis, brand and interface improvements, and much more. Most important of all, many user personas have been created to evaluate and enhance the UX.

This is a good example to check for anyone looking to improve their own UX case study. Above all, it shows what can be done with rich images, bright colors, clear layouts, and well-crafted personas.

9. Workaway App - UX redesign

Workaway App - UX redesign

Designer : Rocket Pix (UXUI, web designer )

Case Study : Workaway App

This is a mobile app that provides international hospitality services; it helps users to contact each other to organize homestays and cultural exchanges.

This UX design case study explains how the designer redesigned the Workaway App to make it easier for users. Many intuitive charts (pie charts, flow charts, line charts), cards, and images are used to illustrate the ideas.

It is simple and easy to follow, and also a good example of how to create an intuitive case study with charts and cards.

10. Receipe App - UI/UX design process

Receipe App

Designer : Dorothea Niederee (UX, UI designer   )

Case Study : Recipe App

This is a food app design offering inspirational recipes for anyone who wants to eat healthier.

This case study gives a clear demonstration of the entire UI/UX design process. Three user personas are defined to present different users' needs. Some colors, typography, and UI elements are also shared.

This is a good example of how to define a detailed user persona in your UX case study.

11. Hobbfyy - a social and discovery app UX design

Hobbfyy

Designer : Mustafa Aljaburi (UX, UI designer   )

Case Study : Hobbfyy

This is a social and discovery app that makes it quick and easy to get everything you need for your hobbies.

This case study aims to show how to develop a site that will provide its users with solutions, in this case to get what they need for their hobbies. Beautiful images, a storytelling style, and special layouts are used to explain everything.

12. Bee Better - habit tracker app UX case study

Bee Better

Designer :   Anastasiia Mysliuk (UX, UI designer   )

Case Study : Bee Better

This is a habit tracker app that makes it easy for you to develop new useful habits.

This case study aims to solve problems associated with how we form and develop habits. It helps users find solutions and make habit formation more interesting; it motivates them to maintain their useful new habits. Many aspects of design, such as problems, solutions, the design process, discovery and research, user journey map, prototypes, and much more are illustrated and explained in simple language.

This would be a good example to follow if you are looking to create an easy-to-understand UX case study.

13.Sit My Pet - pet sitting app UX case study

Sit My Pet

Designer : Aiman Fakia (UX, UI, visual designer )

Case Study : Sit My Pet

This is a pet-setting app that provides pet owners with a digital service that helps them connect with pet sitters.

This UX case study describes a site that aims to make pet sitting more easily accessible for pet owners. It analyzes both its users and its competitors very well. The way solutions are evaluated, the user stories, and other related aspects are followed in detail to give you a better understanding of the project as a whole.

This is a good example of how to develop a UX design based on user needs.

14. Groad - food ordering system UX case study

Groad

Designer : Phap (UI designer )

Case Study : Groad

This is a food ordering app offering food delivery services from stores, restaurants, cafés, fast food bars, and others. 

This UX case study uses beautiful illustrations and colors to explain the entire design process. As well as the usual parts of the design process—UI flow chart, UI showcasing—the related logo and icon designs, typography, and other aspects are included. This is a good example if you are looking to learn how to create an immersive case study with beautiful illustrations and colors.

15. iOS VS Android UI/UX Case Study

IOS VS Android UI/UX Case Study

Designer : Johanna Rüthers

Case Study : Econsy

Here is another concept app that helps people live more sustainably by using a scanning process to give them information about the ecological and social impact of products they are thinking of buying. 

This case study explains the differences in the mobile app’s appearance when it is applied on the Human Interface Guidelines (IOS) and Material Design Guidelines (Android). This will help you to create an app that works well on both Mac and Android devices.

More UI/UX case studies & designs:

16.Timo Bank - UI/UX Case Study

Timo Bank

Timo Bank is a mobile banking app project produced by Leo Nguyen, a freelance designer and creative director. This case study aims to provide more intuitive transfer, payment, and money management solutions for mobile users.

This is a great example to consider if you are hoping to create a better banking app.

17. Endoberry Health App Design

sites case study examples

Endoberry Health App Design provides useful solutions for women suffering from endometriosis. In turn, this gives doctors a better understanding of individual cases. The design challenges, solutions, and UI details are displayed and explained to illustrate the design project.

18. Job Portal App

Job Portal App

Job Portal App has been specially made for designers and freelancers. This case study uses cute illustrations, simple words, and clear storytelling to explain how the designer worked out the ideal job hunting solutions for users.

19. Cafe Website - UI/UX Case Study

Cafée Website

Café Website gives its users a great experience by making it quick and easy to order a coffee online. Many elegant page details are displayed.

20. Ping - the matchmaker app case study

 Ping

Ping is a dating app that offers users a unique and effective way to find their perfect match. As you can see, its mascot is really cute and this case study will show you how a cute mascot can enhance the UX.

21. Hubba Mobile App - UI/UX Case Study

Hubba Mobile App

Hubba Mobile App is a B2B online marketplace where retailers can find and purchase unique products for their stores or shops. This case study aims to explain the process of creating a special mobile app for this online marketplace. It offers a beautiful and clear presentation of the entire UI/UX design process.

22. Music App - music for children

Music App

Music App shares the fancy UI and colors from a music app made for children. It is a good example that is sure to inspire you to create a distinctive children's app.

How do you create a UX case study?

If you are still not entirely sure how to go about creating a distinctive UX case study, here are a few simple steps to walk you through the entire process from start to finish:

Step  1.  Figure out your purpose

The final outcome will depend on what it is you are trying to achieve. So, before you start writing a UX design case, you should first figure out in detail what its purpose is. Ask yourself some basic questions:

  • Is it for a job interview?
  • Is it for improving your personal portfolio?
  • Is it designed to show off your design talents on social media?
  • Is it just created to practice your design skills?
  • Is it made to share design experiences with other designers?

In short, figuring out your purpose and setting a goal can make the entire design process so much easier.

Step   2.   Plan or outline your case study

Whatever you want to do, it is always a good idea to start with a plan. When it comes to writing a UX case study, you should also outline your entire UX case study and decide on what sections you want to include.

For example, nowadays, a good UX design case study often covers:

  • Overview : Start with a short paragraph that introduces your project.
  • Challenges  and  goals : Explain the project background and point out the biggest challenges or problems you've encountered. Explain the goals you want to achieve and how you will overcome the challenges you have identified. 
  • Roles  and  responsibilities : Tell readers what role you play in the project and the specific features of your role that will help create a better product.
  • Design process : Introduce the entire design process in detail so that readers can see clearly what you have done to make life easier for users. Many employers check this part very carefully to see whether you have the basic skills and abilities they are looking for. So, never underestimate the importance of this section. 
  • Solutions  and  outcomes : No matter what problems you have faced, the solutions and the final outcomes achieved are what really matters. So, always use this section to showcase your skills and achievements. 

You might also want to add further sections:

  • User research :   Some full-stack designers also include this to give a more comprehensive view of their design skills.
  • UI designs : Some experienced designers also display their relevant UIs, and UI flow, along with low- and high-fidelity prototypes to enrich the content.

Of course, if you are a newbie, and you still have questions, why not go online and search for UX case study templates that you can study and follow.

Step 3.  Explain the design process clearly

As we've explained above, the design process is always one of the most important parts of a good UX case study. You should always introduce clearly as many of the relevant parts of the process as possible. For example: show how you and your team communicate and collaborate effectively; demonstrate how you have developed ideas to address user problems; explain how you and your team have dealt with emergencies or mishaps.  

sites case study examples

You can also introduce the UX design tools that you have chosen to simplify the entire design process. Mockplus, is an online product design platform, enabled us to adapt quickly and effectively to working from home during the recent Coronavirus lockdown. Prototyping our designs, sharing ideas, working together in an effective team, taking the process from design to handoff, it all works smoothly with this single tool.

Step  4. Improve readability and visual appeal

The content should be the main focus of your case study—but not the only focus. To make the case study as good as possible, you also need to think about its readability and visual appeal. Here are some suggestions to follow:

  • Explain everything as clearly as possible.
  • Add images, illustrations, charts, cards, icons, and other visuals.
  • Create a clear storytelling structure or layout.
  • Choose an immersive color scheme.
  • Add eye-catching animations and interactions.
  • Use vivid video, audio, and other multimedia resources.

The final visual effect can be make-or-break for whether your UX case study is going to stand out from the crowd. You should always take it seriously.

Step   5. Summarize

Every UX case study can be a good chance to practice and improve your design skills. So, in your conclusion, don’t forget to analyze the entire process and summarize the outcomes. Always take a minute to figure out what lessons you should take away from the process, what tips should be remembered, what should be improved, and—most important—what your next steps are going to be.

UX case studies are one of the most essential parts of a UX designer's portfolio. The ability to write a well-structured UX case study is also one of the basic skills that a competent UX professional should have. So, UX case studies play a very important role in UX designer's life.

We hope our picks of the best UX design case studies along with our step-by-step guide will help you create a stunning UX case study.

In- house content editor, specialize in SEO content writing. She is a fruit lover and visionary person.

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Hertz CEO Kathryn Marinello with CFO Jamere Jackson and other members of the executive team in 2017

Top 40 Most Popular Case Studies of 2021

Two cases about Hertz claimed top spots in 2021's Top 40 Most Popular Case Studies

Two cases on the uses of debt and equity at Hertz claimed top spots in the CRDT’s (Case Research and Development Team) 2021 top 40 review of cases.

Hertz (A) took the top spot. The case details the financial structure of the rental car company through the end of 2019. Hertz (B), which ranked third in CRDT’s list, describes the company’s struggles during the early part of the COVID pandemic and its eventual need to enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy. 

The success of the Hertz cases was unprecedented for the top 40 list. Usually, cases take a number of years to gain popularity, but the Hertz cases claimed top spots in their first year of release. Hertz (A) also became the first ‘cooked’ case to top the annual review, as all of the other winners had been web-based ‘raw’ cases.

Besides introducing students to the complicated financing required to maintain an enormous fleet of cars, the Hertz cases also expanded the diversity of case protagonists. Kathyrn Marinello was the CEO of Hertz during this period and the CFO, Jamere Jackson is black.

Sandwiched between the two Hertz cases, Coffee 2016, a perennial best seller, finished second. “Glory, Glory, Man United!” a case about an English football team’s IPO made a surprise move to number four.  Cases on search fund boards, the future of malls,  Norway’s Sovereign Wealth fund, Prodigy Finance, the Mayo Clinic, and Cadbury rounded out the top ten.

Other year-end data for 2021 showed:

  • Online “raw” case usage remained steady as compared to 2020 with over 35K users from 170 countries and all 50 U.S. states interacting with 196 cases.
  • Fifty four percent of raw case users came from outside the U.S..
  • The Yale School of Management (SOM) case study directory pages received over 160K page views from 177 countries with approximately a third originating in India followed by the U.S. and the Philippines.
  • Twenty-six of the cases in the list are raw cases.
  • A third of the cases feature a woman protagonist.
  • Orders for Yale SOM case studies increased by almost 50% compared to 2020.
  • The top 40 cases were supervised by 19 different Yale SOM faculty members, several supervising multiple cases.

CRDT compiled the Top 40 list by combining data from its case store, Google Analytics, and other measures of interest and adoption.

All of this year’s Top 40 cases are available for purchase from the Yale Management Media store .

And the Top 40 cases studies of 2021 are:

1.   Hertz Global Holdings (A): Uses of Debt and Equity

2.   Coffee 2016

3.   Hertz Global Holdings (B): Uses of Debt and Equity 2020

4.   Glory, Glory Man United!

5.   Search Fund Company Boards: How CEOs Can Build Boards to Help Them Thrive

6.   The Future of Malls: Was Decline Inevitable?

7.   Strategy for Norway's Pension Fund Global

8.   Prodigy Finance

9.   Design at Mayo

10. Cadbury

11. City Hospital Emergency Room

13. Volkswagen

14. Marina Bay Sands

15. Shake Shack IPO

16. Mastercard

17. Netflix

18. Ant Financial

19. AXA: Creating the New CR Metrics

20. IBM Corporate Service Corps

21. Business Leadership in South Africa's 1994 Reforms

22. Alternative Meat Industry

23. Children's Premier

24. Khalil Tawil and Umi (A)

25. Palm Oil 2016

26. Teach For All: Designing a Global Network

27. What's Next? Search Fund Entrepreneurs Reflect on Life After Exit

28. Searching for a Search Fund Structure: A Student Takes a Tour of Various Options

30. Project Sammaan

31. Commonfund ESG

32. Polaroid

33. Connecticut Green Bank 2018: After the Raid

34. FieldFresh Foods

35. The Alibaba Group

36. 360 State Street: Real Options

37. Herman Miller

38. AgBiome

39. Nathan Cummings Foundation

40. Toyota 2010

5 inspiring web design case studies

A good case study makes for a top calling card; check out these examples.

The reality of web design is that once you've finished a project, you hopefully move straight onto the next one. However, every site you deliver is an essential portfolio piece that demonstrates your skills and abilities, and while you'll usually want to link to your recent work on your site, it pays to do the job properly.

Rather than simply grabbing a screenshot of a landing page and a link and adding it to your online portfolio, writing up an engaging case study on your work can be a lot more worthwhile. Case studies don't need to be lengthy essays; they just need to give readers a taste of your process and provide some insight into the challenges you've faced over the course of a web build and how you solved them. 

They're a great way to let potential clients know how you work, and they can also provide inspiration for other designers and developers; here are five of our favourite recent examples. Make sure you also check out our top web design tips .

  • How to write engaging case studies for your portfolio

01. Museum of Science and Industry of Chicago

For a really inspiring case study, it's hard to beat DogStudio's extensive piece chronicling its work for the Museum of Science and Industry of Chicago. The museum is a vast and highly respected American institution, and you can't help but get the impression that DogStudio was punching well above its weight when it won the commission to rethink and revamp its web platform, but as this case study reveals, it carried the job off with aplomb.

Packed with revealing wireframes, imagery and animations, it's a fascinating insight into a massive and challenging build that had to cater for more than five million online visitors wanting to do everything from buy tickets through to figuring out where to park and finding information about individual exhibits. 

02. National Geographic: A Bear's-Eye View of Yellowstone

Sometimes it's better to show rather than tell. For this captivating look at Yellowstone National Park as seen by four bears fitted with camera collars and GPS, Hello Monday had a wealth of footage, data and expert analysis to work with. And rather than go into dry details of how it fitted everything together, it keeps things brief in its case study , providing a short outline of the project and deliverables before moving on to an entirely visual essay that demonstrates just how much work went into creating this digital feature.

As well as a good helping of footage and screenshots showcasing what the site's all about, what we really love about this study is a section dedicated to how Hello Monday stamped its own personality on the project, breathing extra life into the feature with animation, watercolour illustrations and pencil-drawn portraits of each bear.

03. Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood

Currently doing big business at the box office, Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood is a love letter to 1960's cinema that recreates its era with Tarantino's typical attention to detail. And to create an online presence that captured the feel of 1969 Hollywood as well as the film, LA agency Watson went the extra mile to create a digital magazine that feels like it could have come off a newsstand 50 years ago.

In this case study the Watson team explain not only the thinking behind the magazine and its pitch-perfect adverts, but also how they create a physical print run of the mag that got handed out at the premiere and first-night screenings, creating a whole other social buzz as movie fans posted shots of their magazine to prove that they were there. If you're looking for ideas on how to run a strong social campaign, there's some great material here. 

04. British Red Cross

Kota's case study on its recent work with the British Red Cross is a clear and concise piece that provides valuable insight on the challenges – and opportunities – of working on a campaign with an institution with clear-cut brand guidelines that need to be adhered to. In the case of the British Red Cross's OneKindThing campaign, Kota had to create a platform that stood out from previous campaigns while staying within the society's pretty epic brand guidelines.

With a handful of images and a couple of paragraphs, Kota outlines how it managed just that, and also covers some of the technical hurdles that had to be overcome to deliver the finished site. The end result was well worth the effort, as the British Red Cross testimonial at the end of the case study reveals.

05. Stonewall Forever

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, an event that helped bring about the Pride movement, Stink Digital partnered with The LGBT Community Center to create Stonewall Forever, an immersive digital experience that features key narratives and previously unheard stories from LGBTQ+ history. 

Stink Digital's case study explains how it built a living monument to 50 years of Pride, based in Christopher Park, New York, but accessible anywhere through a website or AR app, and goes into some detail of the challenges of creating a WebGL monument that consists of over 10,000 individual shards with post-processing effects, but still runs at 60fps, even on low-end devices. 

Beyond the technical challenges, though, this is an absorbing and insightful piece on a project that explores life before, during and after the Stonewall Riots.

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Jim McCauley is a writer, performer and cat-wrangler who started writing professionally way back in 1995 on PC Format magazine, and has been covering technology-related subjects ever since, whether it's hardware, software or videogames. A chance call in 2005 led to Jim taking charge of Computer Arts' website and developing an interest in the world of graphic design, and eventually led to a move over to the freshly-launched Creative Bloq in 2012. Jim now works as a freelance writer for sites including Creative Bloq, T3 and PetsRadar, specialising in design, technology, wellness and cats, while doing the occasional pantomime and street performance in Bath and designing posters for a local drama group on the side.

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12 great case study examples (plus case study writing tips)

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This long-form content style is also becoming more common as more marketers discover its value. According to Hubspot’s 2021 State of Marketing report , more than 30% of marketers use case studies as a primary marketing media—up from 13% in 2020.

If you’re new to the world of case studies, we’ll be diving into what case studies are, why they’re important, and how to create your own. We’ll also highlight some compelling case study examples that you can learn from.

What is a case study?

A good case study highlights customer stories showing the following:

  • The problems the business faced before using a product or service
  • How the product or service proposed to solve the problems
  • The before and after of using a product or service
  • The measurable positive impact of the product or service on metrics such as click-through rate, website traffic, or sales

While case studies are most often product or service-focused, sometimes businesses use them to share their brand or founder story.

These types of case studies typically focus on organizational progress, such as how they grew their revenue or website traffic. One example is this Outfunnel case study on how the team saved over 80% of its time with user onboarding.

Why are case studies important?

They may not suit every business. But case studies are beneficial, for example, for helping SaaS brands reach future customers.

If they make sense for your industry, case studies should be an important part of your content marketing strategy for many reasons.

Three reasons you should incorporate them as soon as possible are:

  • To provide value to your audience: At its core, the best marketing doesn’t just drive sales; it serves its audience. Case studies are a brilliant way to teach your audience tips they can incorporate into their businesses. It can also serve as research for industry experts to quote.
  • To show off your expertise: A great case study is a perfect blend of data and storytelling. It showcases your expertise to your target audience, most likely dealing with similar issues. By telling a good story in your case studies, you’re essentially saying, “Look how we made everything better for X client—we can do that for you, too.”
  • As social proof: Because case studies are available to the public, they’re undeniable social proof—better than hard-to-believe testimonials with client initials. This makes them extra valuable as MOFU and BOFU content ; they can drive sales at the click of a button.

Good to Know: Not sure how to use case studies? They work well as lead magnets, landing pages, repurposed blog posts, and, if you have the capacity, even video content!

12 real-life case study examples to bookmark

Reading about the mechanics of case studies is more straightforward than writing case studies from scratch.

That’s why we’ve gathered 12 real-life marketing case study examples you can review before you embark on creating yours.

1. GatherContent | University of Edinburgh

GatherContent case study example

What works: In this great case study, GatherContent includes quotes from the client (the University of Edinburgh) about how their software has improved their content workflow. This adds a human element and will help readers with the same issues identify with the client.

View more GatherContent case studies .

2. Omniscient Digital | AppSumo

Omniscient Digital case study example

What works: Omniscient Digital includes client feedback in video format and shares the results they achieved in a digestible bullet point format.

3. Bit.ly | Vissla

Bit.ly case study example

What works: Besides hosting this case study on their website, Bit.ly provides a PDF link that can both be viewed online or downloaded. Plus, the PDF is visually appealing and easy to read.

4. Asana | Autodesk

Asana case study example

What works: Asana leads with their impact and includes basic information about their client to the right of the page so the reader immediately gets bite-sized background information.

5. Shopify | Bombas

Shopify case study example

What works: Shopify includes a video in their case study, as well as multiple eye-catching images of Bombas products. This ensures that the case study serves both companies, possibly generating customer interest in Bombas socks.

6. Outfunnel | Alight Analytics

sites case study examples

What works: Outfunnel has repurposed its case study into a blog post, which increases its visibility. The study is also full of client quotes, which adds valuable social proof.

7. Sapling | Zapier

Sapling case study example

What works: Sapling also shares quick preliminary information about Zapier on the left panel and includes several screenshots to show the impact of their product on the company’s processes.

8. BigCommerce | Skullcandy

sites case study examples

What works: The quick metrics in bold hit readers quickly and highlight BigCommerce expertise to potential customers even before they read the entire case study.

9. Google Ads | L’Oreal

Google ads case study for L'Oreal

What works: Video format. Few things beat hearing the client praise the service and explain the process and results of the campaign in their own words.

10. ActiveCampaign | Your Therapy Source

ActiveCampaign case study example

What works: ActiveCampaign efficiently showcases the problems and solutions before delving into how they helped the client achieve desired results.

11. Intuit | Xenex Healthcare

Intuit case study example

What works: The main benefit is highlighted on the first page of the PDF and the rest of the study delves into the process and the nitty-gritty of the product’s impact.

12. Grayscale | Upwork

Grayscale case study

What works: This page features minimal text. It focuses on quotes from decision-makers at Upwork and ends with a call-to-action that will likely drive conversions.

How to write your own case study

How can you write engaging, effective case studies like the examples above? Here are six steps.

1. Identify a worthy case

Think of projects—either for yourself or for clients—that got outstanding results. Then, whittle it down to the cases that your target audience is most likely to relate to , perhaps because they experience the same problem or have the same goal as in the case.

2. Reflect on your chosen case

Once you’ve decided on the case you’ll start with, do some deeper reflection on the details. What was the project goal? What challenges did you encounter along the way? How did you overcome them to reach your goal?

3. Think about differentiation

Take the last step even further and think of anything you did differently than others might. Did you an experimental tactic or strategy or create a custom solution? If so, use those details to subtly show potential customers why they should be interested in what you have to offer.

4. Gather quotes

Next, get hard-hitting quotes from project stakeholders or clients. Having their thoughts on goals, project obstacles, the solutions provided, and the outcomes will make your description of the case more credible.

5. Draft your case study

Time to turn the details you’ve compiled into a case study draft. How? We’ll talk about the best format for case studies shortly.

6. Add visuals

Next, create visuals that will reinforce the main points of your case study. These could include:

  • Charts or screenshots to show the change in metrics before and after the project
  • An infographic to give a brief visual overview of the case
  • Pictures of deliverables (e.g. a web design agency might show a picture of the new site it designed for a client)
  • Product images such as screenshots from within your software that was used on the project

After any designated reviewers and approvers give their stamp of approval on the case study, it’s ready to be published and promoted!

What’s the best case study format?

We’ve seen A+ examples of case studies and gotten some more context on how to create them for your brand or organization. Now, it's time to get to work. As you do, remember to include the following vital sections in your case study format:

  • Client name and profile
  • The problem
  • Your solution (and screenshots!)
  • Before and after ( real results with data)
  • Appealing visuals, photos, illustrations, infographics, charts, and graphs
  • A memorable CTA

Ready to get started? Thankfully, you don’t have to go it alone.

GatherContent—a powerful tool for case study creation

GatherContent makes it possible to keep track of all your case study research —even while working with your marketing team. You don’t have to guess what stage the piece is at or consult another tool to know when your part is due or who to pass the torch to.

GatherContent is a content hub that helps you keep all your content creation in one place , whether you’re writing blog posts, email newsletters, social media posts, or case studies. With content modeling features like Components , you can effortlessly maintain brand identity throughout all your case studies.

Read more customer success stories here to learn more!

Techniques for collaboratively prioritising content

Learn six collaborative methods for prioritising content so your team can be aligned and have confidence in the content being published..

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February 9, 2024

Can't find what you're looking for?

Case Study Mastery: Examples & Step-by-Step Templates

Master case study: Uncover key strategies to conduct & present findings that influence decisions charachters.

What's Inside?

Understanding and sharing success stories in the business management world is crucial for grasping the growth journey of a business.

In this article, we will delve into the concept of a business management case study, exploring its definition, benefits, limitations, step-by-step process, types, and essential elements.

What is a Case Study?

A case study research is a detailed analysis of a particular subject, often a real-world situation or scenario, to draw insights and conclusions. It serves as a valuable tool for learning from successful strategies, identifying challenges, and making informed decisions.

case study

Key Characteristics of a Case Study:

Specific Focus: Case studies concentrate on a particular subject, narrowing down the scope to delve deeply into specific aspects.

Real-world Context: Unlike theoretical studies, case studies are grounded in the real world. They often involve the examination of actual events, circumstances, or challenges.

Comprehensive Exploration: Case studies involve a thorough investigation of multiple facets of the chosen subject. This may include collecting and analyzing data, conducting interviews, and reviewing relevant documents.

case studies

Contextualization: Each case study is set within a context, providing background information to help readers or viewers understand the circumstances surrounding the case.

Problem-Solving Orientation: While exploring the intricacies of a case, case studies often aim to identify problems, challenges, or opportunities. They can be used as tools for problem-solving and decision-making.

In-depth Analysis: The analysis in a case study goes beyond surface-level observations. It involves a detailed examination of factors contributing to the situation, allowing for a nuanced understanding.

Presentation of Findings: A case study concludes with the presentation of findings, insights, and conclusions. Leveraging a visually compelling presentation plays a vital role for a case study to speak out.

presentation

Why You Should Write a Case Study?

Writing a case study offers several compelling reasons for individuals and businesses alike:

Demonstrate Success: A case study allows you to showcase your achievements and successes. It provides tangible evidence of your capabilities, helping build trust and credibility with potential clients, customers, or collaborators.

Demonstrate Success

Educate and Inform: Use case studies to share valuable insights, lessons learned, and best practices. By documenting your experiences, you contribute to the collective knowledge within your industry, positioning yourself as an authority and resource.

Problem-Solving Showcase: If your case study revolves around overcoming challenges, it highlights your problem-solving abilities. This can be particularly impactful in industries where complex issues require innovative solutions.

Engage Your Audience: Well-crafted case studies are engaging and resonate with your audience. They tell a story, making information more relatable and memorable. This storytelling aspect can captivate readers and enhance their understanding of your work.

Engage Your Audience

Build Brand Awareness: Case studies provide an opportunity to promote your brand in a context that goes beyond traditional marketing. Through real-world examples, you can reinforce your brand message and values.

Attract New Opportunities: A compelling case study can attract new opportunities, whether it be clients, partnerships , or collaborations. It serves as a powerful marketing tool, showcasing your expertise and capabilities to a wider audience.

Validate Your Methods: For businesses, case studies serve as a validation of their methods and strategies. Employing a robust case study methodology is a way to demonstrate the effectiveness of your products, services, or approaches to potential clients or customers through a thorough research process.

Internal Learning: Writing a case study requires reflection on your processes and approach case outcomes. This internal learning process can contribute to continuous improvement within your organization , fostering a culture of innovation and adaptability.

Internal Learning

SEO Benefits: Case studies can be optimized for search engines, contributing to your online visibility. Including relevant keywords and internal links in your case studies can improve your website's SEO , attracting more organic traffic.

Differentiation: In competitive industries, a well crafted case study sets you apart from the competition. It allows you to highlight what makes your approach unique and why clients or customers should choose your products or services.

Benefits and Limitations of Case Studies

 Limitations of Case Studies

Benefits of Case Studies:

  • Evident Success Stories: Case studies serve as tangible evidence of a business's success, allowing them to showcase real-world achievements and build credibility with potential clients or customers.
  • Effective Marketing Tool: They function as powerful marketing tools by providing in depth insights into a business's capabilities , differentiating it from competitors, and influencing the decision making process of potential clients.
  • Client Relationship Building: Through detailed case studies, businesses can strengthen relationships with existing clients by demonstrating their commitment, problem solving abilities, and delivering measurable results.
  • Versatile Content: Case studies offer versatile content that can be repurposed across various marketing channels, including websites, social media, presentations, and promotional materials.
  • Educational Value: Businesses can use case studies to educate their target audience about their industry, innovative solutions, and best practices, positioning themselves as thought leaders.

Limitations of Case Studies:

  • Resource Intensive: Creating comprehensive case studies demands significant resources, including time, effort, and potential costs, making them resource-intensive for businesses.
  • Limited Generalization: Findings from a specific case study may not be universally applicable, limiting their generalizability to other scenarios or industries.
  • Potential Bias: There is a risk of bias in the selection and presentation of information, as businesses may be inclined to emphasize positive outcomes and downplay challenges.
  • Confidentiality Concerns: Businesses may face challenges in sharing detailed information, especially if it involves sensitive data or strategies, raising concerns about confidentiality.
  • Difficulty in Replication: The unique circumstances of a case study may make it challenging to replicate the same success in different contexts, limiting the broader applicability of the insights gained.

How to Conduct a Case Analysis: Step-by-step

1. define the objective:.

  • Clearly outline the purpose of the case study. What do you aim to achieve or understand through this analysis?

purpose of the case study

2. Select the Case:

  • Identify a relevant and specific case that aligns with your objective. For an important case study this could be a real-world situation, event, or phenomenon.

3. Background Research:

  • Gather background information about the case. This may include historical context, key players involved, and any existing literature on the subject.

Background Research

4. Identify Key Issues or Questions:

  • Formulate specific research questions or highlight key issues you want to address through the case study.

5. Choose the Research Method:

  • Decide on the case study method or approach for data collection. A case study research method could involve qualitative methods such as interviews, observations, or document analysis.

6. Develop Data Collection Plan:

  • Outline a detailed plan for collecting data. Specify sources, methods, and tools you will use to gather relevant information.

Develop Data Collection Plan

7. Data Collection:

  • Execute the data collection plan. Conduct interviews , observe events, and analyze documents to accumulate necessary data.

8. Data Analysis:

  • Apply appropriate analytical techniques to interpret the gathered data. This may involve coding, categorizing, and identifying patterns or themes.

9. Construct the Case Study Narrative:

  • Organize the findings into a coherent and structured narrative. Develop sections that cover the introduction, background, analysis, and conclusion.

Construct the Case Study Narrative

10. Draw Conclusions:

  • Based on your analysis, after you conduct case study , draw conclusions that address the research questions or objectives. Consider the implications of your findings.

11. Peer Review or Feedback:

  • Seek feedback from colleagues, mentors, or peers to ensure the validity and reliability of your case study.

12. Finalize the Case Study:

  • Incorporate feedback and make necessary revisions. Finalize the case study, ensuring clarity, coherence, and adherence to ethical guidelines.

13. Document and Share:

  • Prepare the case study for publication or presentation and take advantage of Decktopus AI, a user-friendly and efficient presentation generator powered by AI. Easily convert your case study insights into a visually compelling deck.

Decktopus AI

  • Decktopus ensures your case studies are presented in a format that engages your audience, making your narratives more impactful and memorable. Explore the benefits of Decktopus AI to elevate your case study presentations effortlessly.

What are the Components of a Case Study

The format of a case study typically comprises several key components to present information in a structured and comprehensive manner. While variations may exist based on the context and purpose, a standard case study format often includes the following elements:

1. Introduction:

Provide a brief overview of the case and set the stage for the reader. Outline the main objectives and establish the context of the study.

introduction

2. Background:

Present relevant background information about the subject of the case. This may include the history, industry context, or any pertinent details necessary for understanding the situation.

Background

3. Problem Statement or Objectives:

Clearly state the problem or the main objectives of the case study. Define the issues or challenges that the study aims to address.

Problem Statement or Objectives

4. Analysis:

Dive into the analysis of the case. This section often comprises multiple sub-sections, each exploring different aspects such as market conditions, internal factors, external influences, etc.

data

5. Solution or Action:

Propose solutions or actions to address the identified problems. Detail the steps taken or recommended strategies based on the analysis.

solution

6. Results:

Present the outcomes of the solutions or actions taken. Include any measurable results, impacts, or changes observed.

result

7. Conclusion:

Summarize the key points, outcomes, and lessons learned. Revisit the problem statement and emphasize the significance of the study, highlighting how the research design shaped the results.

conclusion

Types of Case Studies

Case study examples, 1. marketing case study template.

marketing case study

The Marketing Case Study Template is tailored for marketers, highlighting successful marketing strategies . Uncover the methods employed, target audience engagement, and measurable outcomes.

Ideal for marketing professionals seeking insights into effective campaign executions. With Decktopus AI , spending your precious time perpetually recreating your product's presentation has become an ancient practice.

Along with our collection of case-study templates, with our one-click platform, you can easily create beautiful presentations for yourself or your clients.

Also check out: creative marketing case study template .

2. Sales Case Study Template

 Sales Case Study Template

The Sales Case Study Template is designed for salespeople to present and discuss case studies in sales meetings. With its professional look and engaging layout, your clients will be impressed with the level of detail you put into your analysis.

This professionally designed template is easy to use and easy to customize, making it the perfect way to show off your small business expertise.

So whether you're looking to wow potential clients or just need a little more confidence in your sales meetings, our client case study template will help you make an impact.

Also check-out: case study template for sales teams .

3. Design Case Study Example: UI Case Study Template

ui case

The UI Case Study Template is specifically designed for UI designers, making it easy to discuss your design process and findings. Present your design case studies like a pro with our target-spesific case study templates. With our design case study template , you'll be able to showcase your work in a clear, professional manner.

Looking to create a stunning case study presentation for your next client meeting? Look no further than our case study templates! Our professional and easy-to-use templates are perfect for designers of all experience levels, and will help you showcase your work in a clear and concise way.

Also check out: Art Case Study Template .

Explore More Case Study Templates

Case Study Templates

Discover a vast collection of case study templates from various fields, including marketing, sales, and design, in our dedicated Case Study Examples Blog. Gain insights into diverse business scenarios and find inspiration for your own projects.

Case Study Presentation Creation with Decktopus AI

Streamlining the creation of engaging visual case studies has never been easier than with Decktopus AI . This innovative platform offers a seamless experiencensimply write your input, and Decktopus takes care of the rest, ensuring that your templates not only boast a polished visual appeal but also integrate relevant and impactful content effortlessly.

Discover how easy it is to create engaging case study templates using Decktopus AI . Our platform ensures your templates look great and contain relevant content. With the help of our AI assistant, you not only get support during presentations but also receive tips, facilitate Q&A, and increase overall engagement.

Explore the unique storytelling format that Decktopus offers, making your case studies more relatable. For a step-by-guide on how to easily create a visually stunning case study with Decktopus, see our case study examples blog.

Decktopus AI

This approach allows you to present information in a narrative style, connecting better with your audience. Find practical tips for smoother case study presentations, from effective storytelling to engaging your audience. Improve your presentation experience with Decktopus AI , where simplicity meets interactivity and storytelling for effective communication.

It features, practical design, mobilizing easy principles of marketing ecosystem platform design. Making it by far the easiest thing to use in your daily practice of mobilizing marketing ecosystems through platform strategies.

Frequently Asked Questions

1) what is a marketing case study.

A marketing case study is a concise analysis of a business's marketing strategy, showcasing its objectives, challenges, tactics, and outcomes. It offers practical insights into real-world marketing applications, serving as a valuable learning tool for understanding successful practices and lessons learned in achieving specific marketing goals.

2) What is a case study?

A case study, or case report, is a concise examination of a specific subject, often real-world situations or problems, providing detailed insights and analysis for learning or decision-making purposes.

3) How should you write a case study?

To create an impactful case study, define objectives, choose a relevant case, gather key information, and use Decktopus for a polished presentation. Employ data analysis, construct a clear narrative, and offer actionable recommendations.

Validate findings and consider broader implications. Decktopus streamlines this process, providing a user-friendly platform for creating compelling case study presentations effortlessly.

sites case study examples

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February 13, 2024

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25 Great Web Design Case Study Examples

Creating compelling and engaging case studies is an important part of being a designer. A portfolio of case studies is the standard barometer used to judge the quality of a professional. Seeing how designers work, create, build and play is great, and furthermore, you can learn how to write a great case study yourself. Thanks to all the designers that shared their process and made this awesome experience possible! So here`s a list of some of great examples of good design case studies I`ve come across.

Unleash The Power of WordPress Ad

Awesome collection of 11,000+ wordpress themes, including bootstrap templates & design assets, blog & magazine, creative portfolio, landing page.

Hypergiant

Uber 2018 Brand Case Study

Uber 2018 Brand Case Study

World Champion Amsterdam

World Champion Amsterdam

Robin Payot

Robin Payot

Implement Consulting Group

Implement Consulting Group

Buzzworthy Studio

Buzzworthy Studio

Van Holtz Co

Van Holtz Co

Xavier Cusso

Xavier Cusso

Dropbox Design

Dropbox Design

Petrosdimitriadis

petrosdimitriadis

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How the F*ck

+5 Niche Site Case Studies & Examples from 2023 [Real Interviews]

Niche websites are a great source of passive income. The biggest success stories rake up tens of thousands of dollars a month for their owners.

But it can be difficult to know where to start, or what even to do if you’ve just decided to create your own niche site.

That’s where our list of niche site case studies comes in, to help you understand exactly what works in the SERPs.

In this article:

  • A quick summary of 5 niche website SEO case studies
  • The secret sauce behind each one

5 of the Best Niche Website Case Studies to Learn From

Check out the top niche site examples from our extensive collection of SEO case studies .

1. How Living Cozy Grew to 335K Views/Month

Ash Read, Buffer's Ex-Editorial Director, ventured out on his own to build a niche site dedicated to home & furniture product discovery.

The website now has:

  • 300 blog posts
  • 6.6K position 1-3 keywords
  • 12K position 4-10 keywords
  • 335,000 page views (Jan ‘23)
  • Far north of £10K monthly revenue

How did he do it?

I've interviewed 50+ marketers and I’ve never seen an approach like it.

The playbook:

  • Find competitor weaknesses
  • Create extensive topic clusters
  • Build automated E-E-A-T
  • Layer expertise
“Whatever you're doing, like whether it's a website or starting an Instagram account, an email newsletter, I think just committing to a number gives you time for it to work. Because if you write one or two blog posts, you're not gonna see traffic and it's very easy to give up.”—Ash Read

Read the highlights in my LinkedIn carousel here.

Read/listen to the full case study here.

2. How Alphabetimals got 300,000 in monthly traffic from just 87 pages

seo case study niche examples

Here’s a site that began as a passion project and grew into an SEO beast.

We’re talking about 87 pages with an average of < 500 words bringing in over 300K monthly organic visitors. With a DR of (only) 33!

Alphabetimals is, as its name suggests, a directory of animals. It was created by a married couple eager to help youngsters learn the English language.

What is its secret?

  • Obvious keyword pattern, making it easy to design templates for batch-creating content.

sites case study examples

Example of keyword patterns from Alphabetimals.

  • A strong focus on meeting the search intent, the quality of the user experience, and becoming a complete resource rather than fixating on word count.
  • Multimedia pages with custom-made images and accompanying YouTube videos.
  • Several different monetization channels, including an app.

3. How This EU Citizenship Blog Earns £7K/Month in 2 Years

niche site case study from digital emigre

Check out this crazy graph of Digital Émigré , the second in line of our niche website examples:

sites case study examples

This EU citizenship blog skyrocketed from 0 to ~75K organic visitors per month.

That’s from 0 to £7K per month passive income in just two years (replacing the founder's full-time job!)

Here’s how Samantha North, DÉ’s creator, did it:

  • Choosing a niche that was both profitable and that she was incredibly passionate about. Building a niche website is hard work and it’s near impossible to pull it off if you’re not passionate about its topic.
“Are you going to be interested in this long enough to maintain the pace of all the writing you’ll need to do to make this a success, to make this rank?” - Samantha North
  • Writing about topics that solve the core problems for her target audience.
  • Implementing the good ol’ SEO basics: targeting long-tail keywords, uncovering low KD keywords from analyzing competitors, and creating topic clusters.
  • Monetizing the blog in many different ways: through ads, referral partnerships, consulting, and affiliate programs.

4. How Retro Dodo Grew to 1 Million Clicks & $50K Monthly Revenue in 3 Years

niche site example retro dodo

Even though Retro Dodo more than deserves its spot on our list of best niche websites, its creator, Brandon Saltalamacchia, actually didn’t set out to build a profitable niche website.

He set out to build a brand.

And with over 1M monthly organic clicks, it’s safe to say that he achieved it. Retro Dodo has become the go-to site for anyone looking for retro gaming news and reviews.

The key elements to Retro Dodo’s SERP domination are:

  • Building a loyal fan base through social presence, newsletters, and a YouTube channel.
  • Becoming algorithm-proof. Brandon went the extra mile through video marketing, creating custom images for his posts, actually testing the products himself, etc.

sites case study examples

Example from one of Retro Dodo's revenue-generating articles.

  • Building topical authority with topic clusters centered around highly profitable, bottom-of-the-funnel keywords .
“We built an authority on only a number of very small clusters. That’s something a lot of niche site operators need to understand, they can’t go all-guns-blazing and build a gaming brand, tech brand or travel brand, they need to really niche down and build out clusters. Once you’ve got authority, pick something else and eventually you’ll have the entire niche.”—Brandon Saltalamacchia

5. How Bike Lock Wiki Earns $12K/Month

James has been an avid cyclist practically his whole life. It made sense for him to start a niche website focused on all things cycling-related.

The fact that his website, Bike Lock Wiki , now earns an (estimated) $12K per month is just an added bonus.

Almost all of his 157 pages indexed in Google are getting some traffic. According to Ahrefs, it’s over 140K organic visitors per month.

sites case study examples

Here’s a short overview of what James did to help his website succeed:

  • Wrote extremely detailed product reviews. We’re talking about over 10 pictures per post showcasing that he actually used the product, lists of pros and cons, multiple seller links, alternatives, and a lot more.
  • Created an article structure that is incredibly easy to skim and for the reader to get just the information they’re looking for.
  • Internally linked all of his articles in a clear, logical way, and more.

There’s more!

The truth is, there is no one universal way to build your niche website. What strategies and methods you will use largely depend on your niche, how profitable it is, and how many resources you have at your disposal.

Fortunately, we got you covered in the ‘how to do this SEO thing’ domain.

Get instant access to our complete library of SEO case studies and find out exactly what works and what doesn’t right where the action is.

Ben Goodey

Sign in or become a How the F*ck member to join the conversation. Just enter your email below to get a log in link.

What’s the F*cking Point?

The #1 choice that drives $$ from seo, 5-minute experiment that improved my conversion rate by 53%.

sites case study examples

11 Inspiring UX Case Studies That Every Designer Should Study

Discover 11 UX case studies that showcase exceptional design strategies & outcomes. Explore these inspiring examples to elevate your UX design skills.

Gene Kamenez

A UX case study is a sort of detailed overview of a designer's work. They are often part of a UX designer's portfolio and showcase the designer's skill in managing tasks and problems. From a recruiter's perspective, such a UX portfolio shows the skill, insights, knowledge, and talent of the designer.

Therefore, UX case studies play an important role in the recruitment and demand for designers.

What Makes a Powerful Case Study

Building a UX case study includes showing the design process through compelling stories. They will use plain language to demonstrate how they handled key design issues, offering a comprehensive view of their process. Well done case studies often include:

  • A  problem statement and solutions with real applications.
  • Relevant numbers, data, or testimonials to demonstrate the work and efforts.
  • A story that directly connects the problem to the solution.

Any competent UX professional will know that creating a stunning UX case study is about the little details.

11 Best UX Case Studies for Designers

The best way to understand what a good case study looks like is to go over other examples. Each of these UX case study examples shows a designer's insights, basic skills, and other designers' lessons learned through their experience.

1. Promo.com web editor

A case study of a video-creation platform

For this video-creation platform , UX designer Sascha was brought on to revamp v2.0, adding new features that could work alongside the existing UX design. The point was to work on interface details that would help create a user friendly platform, and that users could find simple enough to use.

User personas mapped by the UX designer revealed the most common confusion to be the process of inserting particular features into the video, such as subtitles. The designer's goal, therefore, was to create a platform with improved editor controls.

The designer then used a common text-editor layout to include top and side navigation bars that made it easy to access and implement text editing.

Key Learnings from Promo.com

This case study focuses on addressing a particular problem that customers were currently facing. Its main theme is to show a problem, and how the product designer addressed this problem. Its strength points include:

  • clearly highlighting the problem (i.e. inaccessible and limited video-text editor options)
  • conduction research to understand the nature of the problem and the kind of solutions customers want
  • implementing research insights into the redesign to create a platform that actively served customer needs

2. Productivity tracker app

A case study of a productivity tracker app

The main concept behind this UX case study is to address a pre-existing problem through the design of the app. Immediately from the start, the study highlights a common pain point among users: that of a lack of productivity due to device usage.

This UX case study example addressed some of the main problems within existing productivity apps included:a poor UI and UX that made navigation difficult

  • a poorly-built information architecture
  • limited functions on the mobile application

Key Learnings from the Productivity app case study

The case study highlights the simple design process that was then used to build the app. Wireframes were created, a moldboard developed, and finally, individual pages of the app were designed in line with the initial goals.

3. Postmates Unlimited

A case study of a food delivery app

This case study clearly identifies the improvements made to the Postmates app in a simple overview before jumping into greater detail. The redesign goal, which it achieved, was to improve the experience and other interface details of the app.

The problems identified included:

  • usability that led to high support ticket volume.
  • technical app infrastructure issues that prevented scalability.
  • lack of efficient product management, such as batching orders.

A UX research course can help understand the kind of research needed for a case study. The app redesign involved bringing couriers in and running usability testing on improvements. The final model, therefore, had input from real users on what worked and what caused issues.

Key Learnings from Postmates

The Postmates redesign works as a great UX case study for the simple way it approaches problem-solving. Following an overview of the work, it addresses the problems faced by users of the app. It then establishes research processes and highlights how changes were made to reduce these issues.

4. TV Guide

A case study of a video streaming platform

Addressing the fragmentation of content across channels, this case study sought to redesign how people consume media. The key problems identified included:

  • the overabundance of content across various TV and streaming platforms
  • the difficulty in discovering and managing content across all platforms

To deliver on the key goals of content personalization, smart recommendations, and offering cross-platform content search, the design process included conducting interviews, surveys, and checking customer reviews.

The design of TV Guide enables users to get custom recommendations sourced from friends' and family's watchlists.

Key Learnings from TV Guide

Like previous UX design case studies, this one tackled the issue head-on. Describing the research process, it goes into detail regarding the approach used by the UX designers to create the app. It takes readers on a journey, from identifying pain points, to testing solutions, and implementing the final version.

5. The FlexBox Inspector

A case study of a CSS flexbox tool

Designer Victoria discusses how she developed the investigator tool for the Mozilla Firefox browser. Surveys into understanding the problems with the existing CSS Flexbox tool revealed a need for a user-friendly design. Interviews with a senior designer and other designers helped developers understand the features design-focused tools ought to have. A feature analysis revealed what most users look for in such tools.

The final result of the development process was a design that incorporated several new features, including:

  • a new layout
  • color-coded design
  • multiple entry points to make workflow management efficient

Key Learnings from the Flexbox

This UX design case study starts with a clear goal, then addresses multiple user needs. It clearly defines the design process behind each feature developed by the time, and the reasoning for including that feature. To give a complete picture, it also discusses why certain features or processes were excluded.

6. The Current State of Checkouts

A case study of e-commerce checkout pages

This Baymard UX design case study looks into the checkout process in over 70 e-commerce websites. Through competitive analysis, it isolates problem points in the UX design, which, if addressed, could improve the customer's checkout process.

The study found at least 31 common issues that were easily preventable. The study was designed and conducted on a large scale, over 12 years, to incorporate changing design patterns into the review.

Recommendations based on findings include:

  • prominent guest checkout option
  • simple password requirements
  • specific delivery period
  • price comparison tool for shipping vs store pickup

Key Learnings from Checkout Case Study

Each identified issue is backed up by data and research to highlight its importance. Further research backs up each recommendation made within the case study, with usability testing to support the idea. As far as UX case studies go, this one provides practical insight into an existing, widely used e-commerce feature, and offers practical solutions.

7. New York Times App

A case study of a New York Times app

Using a creative illustration website, the designers proposed a landing page feature "Timely" that could counter the problems faced by the NYT app . Its major issues included too much irrelevant content, low usage, and undesirable coverage of content.

The goal behind Timely was to improve user incentives, build long-term loyalty, and encourage reading. Design mapping for the app covered:

  • identifying the problem
  • understanding audience needs
  • creating wireframes
  • designing and prototyping

The end result was an app that could help readers get notifications regarding news of interest at convenient moments (at breakfast, before bed). This encouraged interaction and improved readability with short-form articles.

Key Learnings from NYT App

The UX case study proposes a problem solution that works with an existing information architecture, instead adding custom graphics to the mobile app. It leads from a simple problem statement to discuss the project that could address these issues without changing was customers already loved.

A case study of the body activity monitoring app

UX case studies focused on redesign include the FitBit redesign, which started off by understanding personas and what users expect from a fitness tracker. Developing use cases and personas, Guerilla usability testing was employed to assess pain points.

These pain points were then ranked based on their importance to users and to app performance. They were addressed through:

  • Highlighting essential parts and features of the app
  • Changing easily missed icons to more recognizable icons
  • relabelling tracking options to guide users better to its usage

Key Learnings from Fitbit

While the case study maps user experiences and offers solutions, it does not begin with an intensive research-based approach. The prototype is successful in testing, but problem factors are not identified with research-based statistics, meaning key factors could have been ignored.

9. Rating System UX

a case study of a rating system

The designer behind the rating system UX redesign sought to solve issues with the 5-star rating system. Highlighted issues included:

  • the lack of subjective accuracy of a 5-point rating system
  • the issue of calculating the average of a zero-star rating
  • average ratings are misleading

Better alternatives include:

  • 5-star emoticon rating that relates the user experience
  • Like/dislike buttons that make approval/disapproval simple

The final design incorporated both these styles to make full use of the rating system.

Key Learnings from Rating System UX

The UX case study stemmed from insight into the limitations of the existing rating system. The new design addressed old issues and incorporated better efficiencies.

A case study for a content design system

The Intuit redesign was focused on making content readable, more engaging, and accessible. Looking into product personalization, the content was found to be lacking aesthetic value, as well as being hard to find. The goal was to create content that was easy to find, clear, and consistent.

The implemented solutions included:

  • increased readability with increased body text and header spacing
  • table of contents on the sidebar for easier navigation
  • visible and prominent search bar
  • illustrations and designs for pretty visuals

Key Learnings from Intuit

The Intuit case study approaches the problem from a practical point of view. It begins with isolating problems with the interface, in particular with the content. This is an example of a case study that breaks down problems into broader categories, and solves each problem with a practical solution.

A case study for a social plaform

This UX case study about a social platform tackles a commonly-faced problem from existing platforms. It addresses the issue of recognizing non-monetary user engagement, to help creators identify their user base.

The case study addresses the problem statement and establishes the design process (building wireframes and prototypes) as well as conducting user testing. The final result is to develop "Discover" pages, engaging layouts, and animated interactions to increase usability.

Key Learnings from Jambb

The study goes into detail regarding problem identification, then moves on to propose solutions that take into account the perspective of all stakeholders involved. It then explains why each design decision was made, and proves its efficacy through testing and prototyping.

Key Takeaways

Developing good UX case studies examples is as much about the details you include as the ones you leave out. Going over UX courses can give you a better understanding of what your case study should look like. A good case study should provide an overview of the problem, include numbers and statistics, and offer practical solutions that directly address the problem. The above-discussed UX case studies provide a good example of the dos and don'ts of a well-structured UX design case study that should be part of every UX portfolio .

Additional Resources

Check out these resources to learn more about UX case studies:

8 UX Case Studies to Read

UX Design Case Study

Frequently Asked Questions

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Case Study: Ronin161’s Portfolio – 2024

A look into the making of Ronin161’s new portfolio for 2024, from ideas to code. Plus an in-depth explanation about the custom Toon Shader.

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Introduction & Motivation

We wanted to update our portfolio, which was created in 2018. For this, our main objective was to maintain the essence of the website, retaining its key points, but rework the art direction, make it more colorful, review our 3D character, the performance, go further on the creative side and add a CMS among other things.

The V01 aimed to offer an original concept as a portfolio with a touch of surrealism and provocation via our 3D, navigation and through the character’s behavior capturing the user’s attention (with awkward, funny or even arrogant poses).

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In this post, we’ll explain some of the main concepts and effects of the website along with some examples.

We wanted to completely rethink the rendering of the meshes to achieve a slightly cartoonish/drawing result.

Also maintaining smooth transitions between pages, with different lighting and rendering, having texts in WebGL stylized with randomized parameters for a unique experience and better integration with the 3D.

Of course, all of this needs to remain as performant as possible.

  • Three.js & Custom WebGL Tools

Custom Toon Shading

There are two parts that compose Toon Shading (also call cel shading).

The first is that, rather than a continuous change of color, values of luminance are clamp resulting in some regions that are all the same color.

Second is that usually Toon shaders objects have outlines around them.

We use Three.js as our WebGL library. There’s a Toon Material in the examples, but unfortunately, it wasn’t quite what we were looking for. We wanted better control over the rendering and to add some grain to the image. So we had to create a custom shader.

Three.js example: https://threejs.org/examples/webgl_materials_toon.html

The first step was to obtain only 2 tones in the shading: the lit part in some color and the shadow part in black. For this, we used the maths of the lights in the shader and compare the value the luminance of the pixel with a threshold. Then, we switch the shadows from black to blue.

The second step was to calculate a gradient for where to apply afterwards the noise gradually.

The third step was to insert noise into this gradient to break up the linear aspect and give it a more drawn aspect.

Afterward, we adjusted the various parameters based on the lighting, character, and the rest of the website to get the desired result.

Post Effects

The website has several post-processing effects.

For context, each page has its own scene, with its own meshes (character, texts, etc.) depending on the content of the page. The different pages are drawn in 2 render targets used in ping-pong method (only active pages are rendered) so that the Slice transition can be possible and done in a fullscreen plane.

Some additional post-effects are added on this plane shader:

  • Vignette , RGB Shift and Bulge Effect : linked to scroll and mouse movement

Next, the rest of the effects are then applied:

  • Fluid simulation : linked to mouse movement and coupled with datamoshing simulation afterwards
  • Datamoshing : UVs deformation based on fluid simulation + optical flow algorithm linked to scroll + pixelation and noise on the result of both simulations
  • Bloom : mainly for videos in the project pages
  • Blur : used when the gallery in project pages is open
  • Color grain : reminder of the toon shader
  • Cursor : the cursor is completely managed in post with shapes in the shader using transform, state, shading, blend

We used our own in-house library of post-processing to give us better control, results and performance for all these effects.

Indeed, some effects such as simulations or bloom require separate render targets for calculations, but all the final calculations and computation of theses do not require separate rendering, so they are automatically compiled into a single shader (resulting in only 1 pass). This avoids having 1 effect = 1 render, which would be too heavy in terms of performance, and lose some quality.

WebGL Texts

We wanted to have text in WebGL as well to better integrate them with the rest of the website and the art direction. However, we didn’t want to entirely neglect accessibility, which is why we also had HTML text underneath some WebGL texts for click and select purposes.

This also gave us more possibilities for rendering (solid texts, outlines, noise, gradients…).

Unfortunately, it’s always a bit complicated to work with text in WebGL (size, wrapping, responsive…), but a few years ago, we also created a custom library to handle this, which we had to improve a lot for this portfolio update. This library uses MSDF texts, allowing for clear, sharp, flexible typography while remaining efficient.

One of the challenges was to able to customize the shader according to our desires, dynamic parameters and the animations of each text, as if they were HTML texts, especially hiding the texts letter by letter, which was a real challenge, we are doing so with custom attribute and uniforms in the shaders.

More infos on MSDF: https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

3D Character

A significant part of the website identity also comes from our iconic character. This was created in Character Creator (CC), a 3D character design software. All textures have been done in Substance Painter.

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We wanted to take up the concept of the V01 of the website, where the character could have multiple poses and follow the cursor with his head to track the user movement.

However, we wanted to make it more lively and unique with each pose. For this, we thought of making his eye blink, as well as giving it more pronounced facial expressions and custom textures for each pose.

The character currently has 7 states, therefore 7 poses, facial expressions, and set of textures (head, arms, body).

This resulted in several challenges:

  • How to use the character from CC but optimize it for the web?
  • How to load multiple poses and facial expressions without loading different files for loading performance?
  • How to make the character blink his eyes?
  • How to optimize textures if we wanted several?
  • Since we only see the top of the character, we removed the bottom part and bones below the waist, allowing us to reduce drastically the filesize. Thanks to CC, we could also export this character in lower definition.
  • To avoid loading multiple models, we decided to have only one file using a skeletal mesh. This allows us to move the bones and thus recreate the poses we wanted. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for facial expressions, for this we needed morphs targets. For optimization and filesize reasons, we decided to divide the character into 2 parts, the body and the head, which we would recombine in code. Indeed, the morphs duplicate all the vertices. Only the vertices of the head needed to be changed, unlike the body which remained static. So we exported the head with all the bones and the morphs we need to set them in code like the bones to give us the expression we wanted. This means we also can animate the face if we wanted. We also exported the body but with only the bones, much smaller filesize.
  • Thanks to the morphs, we were able to obtain one for opening or closing the eyes. We can play with different timing and delays to add some randomness and realism to the blinking.
  • Despite our efforts, the weight of the mesh, especially the head, and all the textures were too heavy and took up too much GPU RAM for our taste. We converted the mesh into binary glTF with mesh optimizer extension to optimize the vertices and weight. As for textures, we grouped different parts of the body (head, arms, legs) into a spritesheet, which we then converted into the basis format, which is more suitable (and lighter) for the GPU. With all this, we achieved a more satisfying result.

With the workflow we had found, it is entirely possible to easily create new poses and crazy combination and integrate them into the website without adding to much weight in filesize.

Before optimization:

  • Head: 4.9Mo
  • Body: 631Ko
  • 21 textures (7 poses x 3 mesh parts): 3.9Mo

After optimization:

  • Head: 2.9Mo
  • Body: 301Ko
  • 7 textures spritesheet: 1.39Mo

More infos on gltfpack and mesh optimizer: https://meshoptimizer.org/gltf/

Basis compression: https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal

We hope you enjoyed this case study. We can’t go into details about every aspect and issue we encountered, but we hope this gives you a good overview of the challenges and ambitions we had and perhaps you even learned a few tips and tricks.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask us on Twitter or Instagram .

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  • Open access
  • Published: 19 February 2024

Sustaining the collaborative chronic care model in outpatient mental health: a matrixed multiple case study

  • Bo Kim 1 , 2 ,
  • Jennifer L. Sullivan 3 , 4 ,
  • Madisen E. Brown 1 ,
  • Samantha L. Connolly 1 , 2 ,
  • Elizabeth G. Spitzer 1 , 5 ,
  • Hannah M. Bailey 1 ,
  • Lauren M. Sippel 6 , 7 ,
  • Kendra Weaver 8 &
  • Christopher J. Miller 1 , 2  

Implementation Science volume  19 , Article number:  16 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Sustaining evidence-based practices (EBPs) is crucial to ensuring care quality and addressing health disparities. Approaches to identifying factors related to sustainability are critically needed. One such approach is Matrixed Multiple Case Study (MMCS), which identifies factors and their combinations that influence implementation. We applied MMCS to identify factors related to the sustainability of the evidence-based Collaborative Chronic Care Model (CCM) at nine Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) outpatient mental health clinics, 3–4 years after implementation support had concluded.

We conducted a directed content analysis of 30 provider interviews, using 6 CCM elements and 4 Integrated Promoting Action on Research Implementation in Health Services (i-PARIHS) domains as codes. Based on CCM code summaries, we designated each site as high/medium/low sustainability. We used i-PARIHS code summaries to identify relevant factors for each site, the extent of their presence, and the type of influence they had on sustainability (enabling/neutral/hindering/unclear). We organized these data into a sortable matrix and assessed sustainability-related cross-site trends.

CCM sustainability status was distributed among the sites, with three sites each being high, medium, and low. Twenty-five factors were identified from the i-PARIHS code summaries, of which 3 exhibited strong trends by sustainability status (relevant i-PARIHS domain in square brackets): “Collaborativeness/Teamwork [Recipients],” “Staff/Leadership turnover [Recipients],” and “Having a consistent/strong internal facilitator [Facilitation]” during and after active implementation. At most high-sustainability sites only, (i) “Having a knowledgeable/helpful external facilitator [Facilitation]” was variably present and enabled sustainability when present, while (ii) “Clarity about what CCM comprises [Innovation],” “Interdisciplinary coordination [Recipients],” and “Adequate clinic space for CCM team members [Context]” were somewhat or less present with mixed influences on sustainability.

Conclusions

MMCS revealed that CCM sustainability in VA outpatient mental health clinics may be related most strongly to provider collaboration, knowledge retention during staff/leadership transitions, and availability of skilled internal facilitators. These findings have informed a subsequent CCM implementation trial that prospectively examines whether enhancing the above-mentioned factors within implementation facilitation improves sustainability. MMCS is a systematic approach to multi-site examination that can be used to investigate sustainability-related factors applicable to other EBPs and across multiple contexts.

Peer Review reports

Contributions to the literature

We examined the ways in which the sustainability of the evidence-based Collaborative Chronic Care Model differed across nine outpatient mental health clinics where it was implemented.

This work demonstrates a unique application of the Matrixed Multiple Case Study (MMCS) method, originally developed to identify factors and their combinations that influence implementation, to investigate the long-term sustainability of a previously implemented evidence-based practice.

Contextual influences on sustainability identified through this work, as well as the systematic approach to multi-site examination offered by MMCS, can inform future efforts to sustainably implement and methodically evaluate an evidence-based practice’s uptake and continued use in routine care.

The sustainability of evidence-based practices (EBPs) over time is crucial to maximize the public health impact of EBPs implemented into routine care. Implementation evaluators focus on sustainability as a central implementation outcome, and funders of implementation efforts seek sustained long-term returns on their investment. Furthermore, practitioners and leadership at implementation sites face the task of sustaining an EBP’s usage even after implementation funding, support, and associated evaluation efforts conclude. The circumstances and influences contributing to EBP sustainability are therefore of high interest to the field of implementation science.

Sustainability depends on the specific EBP being implemented, the individuals undergoing the implementation, the contexts in which the implementation takes place, and the facilitation of (i.e., support for) the implementation. Hence, universal conditions that invariably lead to sustainability are challenging to establish. Even if a set of conditions could be identified as being associated with high sustainability “on average,” its usefulness is questionable when most real-world implementation contexts may deviate from “average” on key implementation-relevant metrics.

Thus, when seeking a better understanding of EBP sustainability, there is a critical need for methods that examine the ways in which sustainability varies in diverse contexts. One such method is Matrixed Multiple Case Study (MMCS) [ 1 ], which is beginning to be applied in implementation research to identify factors related to implementation [ 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ]. MMCS capitalizes on the many contextual variations and heterogeneous outcomes that are expected when an EBP is implemented across multiple sites. Specifically, MMCS provides a formalized sequence of steps for cross-site analysis by arranging data into an array of matrices, which are sorted and filtered to test for expected factors and identify less expected factors influencing an implementation outcome of interest.

Although the MMCS represents a promising method for systematically exploring the “black box” of the ways in which implementation is more or less successful, it has not yet been applied to investigate the long-term sustainability of implemented EBPs. Therefore, we applied MMCS to identify factors related to the sustainability of the evidence-based Collaborative Chronic Care Model (CCM), previously implemented using implementation facilitation [ 6 , 7 , 8 ], at nine VA medical centers’ outpatient general mental health clinics. An earlier interview-based investigation of CCM provider perspectives had identified key determinants of CCM sustainability at the sites, yet characteristics related to the ways in which CCM sustainability differed at the sites are still not well understood. For this reason, our objective was to apply MMCS to examine the interview data to determine factors associated with CCM sustainability at each site.

Clinical and implementation contexts

CCM-based care aims to ensure that patients are treated in a coordinated, patient-centered, and anticipatory manner. This project’s nine outpatient general mental health clinics had participated in a hybrid CCM effectiveness-implementation trial 3 to 4 years prior, which had resulted in improved clinical outcomes that were not universally maintained post-implementation (i.e., after implementation funding and associated evaluation efforts concluded) [ 7 , 9 ]. This lack of aggregate sustainability across the nine clinics is what prompted the earlier interview-based investigation of CCM provider perspectives that identified key determinants of CCM sustainability at the trial sites [ 10 ].

These prior works were conducted in VA outpatient mental health teams, known as Behavioral Health Interdisciplinary Program (BHIP) teams. While there was variability in the exact composition of each BHIP team, all teams consisted of a multidisciplinary set of frontline clinicians (e.g., psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, nurses) and support staff, serving a panel of about 1000 patients each.

This current project applied MMCS to examine the data from the earlier interviews [ 10 ] for the ways in which CCM sustainability differed at the sites and the factors related to sustainability. The project was determined to be non-research by the VA Boston Research and Development Service, and therefore did not require oversight by the Institutional Review Board (IRB). Details regarding the procedures undertaken for the completed hybrid CCM effectiveness-implementation trial, which serves as the context for this project, have been previously published [ 6 , 7 ]. Similarly, details regarding data collection for the follow-up provider interviews have also been previously published [ 10 ]. We provide a brief overview of the steps that we took for data collection and describe the steps that we took for applying MMCS to analyze the interview data. Additional file  1 outlines our use of the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research (COREQ) Checklist [ 11 ].

Data collection

We recruited 30 outpatient mental health providers across the nine sites that had participated in the CCM implementation trial, including a multidisciplinary mix of mental health leaders and frontline staff. We recruited participants via email, and we obtained verbal informed consent from all participants. Each interview lasted between 30 and 60 min and focused on the degree to which the participant perceived care processes to have remained aligned to the CCM’s six core elements: work role redesign, patient self-management support, provider decision support, clinical information systems, linkages to community resources, and organizational/leadership support [ 12 , 13 , 14 ]. Interview questions also inquired about the participant’s perceived barriers and enablers influencing CCM sustainability, as well as about the latest status of CCM-based care practices. Interviews were digitally recorded and professionally transcribed. Additional details regarding data collection have been previously published [ 10 ].

Data analysis

We applied MMCS’ nine analytical steps [ 1 ] to the interview data. Each step described below was led by one designated member of the project team, with subsequent review by all project team members to reach a consensus on the examination conducted for each step.

We established the evaluation goal (step 1) to identify the ways in which sustainability differed across the sites and the factors related to sustainability, defining sustainability (step 2) as the continued existence of CCM-aligned care practices—namely, that care processes remained aligned with the six core CCM elements. Table  1 shows examples of care processes that align with each CCM element. As our prior works directly leading up to this project (i.e., design and evaluation of the CCM implementation trial that involved the very sites included in this project [ 6 , 15 , 16 ]) were guided by the Integrated Promoting Action on Research Implementation in Health Services (i-PARIHS) framework [ 17 ] and i-PARIHS positions facilitation (the implementation strategy that our trial was testing) as the core ingredient that drives implementation [ 17 ], we selected i-PARIHS’ four domains—innovation, recipients, context, and facilitation—as relevant domains under which to examine factors influencing sustainability (step 3). i-PARIHS posits that the successful implementation of an innovation and its sustained use by recipients in a context is enabled by facilitation (both the individuals doing the facilitation and the process used for facilitation). We examined the data on both sustainability and potentially relevant i-PARIHS domains (step 4) by conducting directed content analysis [ 18 ] of the recorded and professionally transcribed interview data. We used the six CCM elements and the four i-PARIHS domains as a priori codes.

Additional file  2 provides an overview of data input, tasks performed, and analysis output for MMCS steps 5 through 9 described below. We assessed sustainability per site (step 5) by generating CCM code summaries per site, and reached a consensus on whether each site exhibited high, medium, or low sustainability relative to other sites based on the summary data. We assigned a higher sustainability level for sites that exhibited more CCM-aligned care processes, had more participants consistently mention those processes, and considered those processes more as “just the way things are done” at the site. Namely, (i) high sustainability sites had concrete examples of CCM-aligned care processes (such as the ones shown in Table  1 ) for many of the six CCM elements, which multiple participants mentioned as central to how they deliver care, (ii) low sustainability sites had only a few concrete examples of CCM-aligned care processes, mentioned by only a small subset of participants and/or inconsistently practiced, and (iii) medium sustainability sites matched neither of the high nor low sustainability cases, having several concrete examples of CCM-aligned care process for some of the CCM elements, varying in whether they are mentioned by multiple participants or how consistently they are a part of delivering care. For the CCM code summaries per site, one project team member initially reviewed the coded data to draft the summaries including exemplar quotes. Each summary and relevant exemplar quotes were then reviewed by and refined with input from all six project team members during recurring team meetings to finalize the high, medium, or low sustainability designation to use in the subsequent MMCS steps. Reviewing and refining the summaries for the nine sites took approximately four 60-min meetings of the six project team members, with each site’s CCM code summary taking approximately 20–35 min to discuss and reach consensus on. We referred to lists of specific examples of how the six core CCM elements were operationalized in our CCM implementation trial [ 19 , 20 ]. Refinements occurred mostly around familiarizing the newer members of the project team (i.e., those who had not participated in our prior CCM-related work) with the examples and definitions. We aligned to established qualitative analysis methods for consensus-reaching discussions [ 18 , 21 ]. Recognizing the common challenge faced by such discussions in adequately accounting for everyone’s interpretations of the data [ 22 ], we drew on Bens’ meeting facilitation techniques [ 23 ] that include setting ground rules, ensuring balanced participation from all project team members, and accurately recording decisions and action items.

We then identified influencing factors per site (step 6), by generating i-PARIHS code summaries per site and identifying distinct factors under each domain of i-PARIHS (e.g., Collaborativeness and teamwork as a factor under the Recipients domain). For the i-PARIHS code summaries per site, one project team member initially reviewed the coded data to draft the summaries including exemplar quotes. They elaborated on each i-PARIHS domain-specific summary by noting distinct factors that they deemed relevant to the summary, proposing descriptive wording to refer to each factor (e.g., “team members share a commitment to their patients” under the Recipients domain). Each summary, associated factor descriptions, and relevant exemplar quotes were then reviewed and refined with input from all six project team members during recurring team meetings to finalize the relevant factors to use in the subsequent MMCS steps. Finalizing the factors included deciding which similar proposed factor descriptions from different sites to consolidate into one factor and which wording to use to refer to the consolidated factor (e.g., “team members share a commitment to their patients,” “team members collaborate well,” and “team members know each other’s styles and what to expect” were consolidated into the Collaborativeness and teamwork factor under the Recipients domain). It took approximately four 60-min meetings of the six project team members to review and refine the summaries and factors for the nine sites, with each site’s i-PARIHS code summary and factors taking approximately 20–35 min to discuss and reach consensus on. We referred to lists of explicit definitions of i-PARIHS constructs that our team members had previously developed and published [ 16 , 24 ]. We once again aligned to established qualitative analysis methods for consensus-reaching discussions [ 18 , 21 ], drawing on Bens’ meeting facilitation techniques [ 23 ] to adequately account for everyone’s interpretations of the data [ 22 ].

We organized the examined data (i.e., the assessed sustainability and identified factors per site) into a sortable matrix (step 7) using Microsoft Excel [ 25 ], laid out by influencing factor (row), sustainability (column), and site (sheet). We conducted within-site analysis of the matrixed data (step 8), examining the data on each influencing factor and designating whether the factor (i) was present, somewhat present, or minimally present [based on aggregate reports from the site’s participants; used “minimally present” when, considering all available data from a site regarding a factor, the factor was predominantly weak (e.g., predominantly weak Ability to continue patient care during COVID at a medium sustainability site); used “somewhat present” when, considering all available data from a site regarding a factor, the factor was neither predominantly strong nor predominantly weak (e.g., neither predominantly strong nor predominantly weak Collaborativeness and teamwork at a low sustainability site)], and (ii) had an enabling, hindering, or neutral/unclear influence on sustainability (designated as “neutral” when, considering all available data from a site regarding a factor, the factor had neither a predominantly enabling nor a predominantly hindering influence on sustainability). These designations of factors’ presence and influence are conceptually representative of what is commonly referred to as magnitude and valence, respectively, by other efforts that construct scoring for qualitative data (e.g., [ 26 , 27 ]). Like the team-based consensus approach of earlier MMCS steps, factors’ presence and type of influence per site were initially proposed by one project team member after reviewing the matrix’s site-specific data, then refined with input from all project team members during recurring team meetings that reviewed the matrix. Accordingly, similar to the earlier MMCS steps, we aligned to established qualitative methods [ 18 , 21 ] and meeting facilitation techniques [ 23 ] for these consensus-reaching discussions.

We then conducted a cross-site analysis of the matrixed data (step 9), assessing whether factors and their combinations were (i) present across multiple sites, (ii) consistently associated with higher or lower sustainability, and (iii) emphasized at some sites more than others. We noted that any factor may have not come up during interviews with a site because either it is not pertinent or it is pertinent but still did not come up, although we asked an open-ended question at the end of each interview about whether there was anything else that the participant wanted to share regarding sustainability. To adequately account for these possibilities, we decided as a team to regard a factor or a combination of factors as being associated with high/medium/low sustainability if it was identified at a majority (i.e., even if not all) of the sites designated as high/medium/low sustainability (e.g., if the Collaborativeness and teamwork factor is identified at a majority, even if not all, of the high sustainability sites, we would find it to be associated with high sustainability). Like the team-based consensus approach of earlier MMCS steps, cross-site patterns were initially proposed by one project team member after reviewing the matrix’s cross-site data, then refined with input from all project team members during recurring team meetings that reviewed the matrix. Accordingly, similar to the earlier MMCS steps, we aligned to established qualitative methods [ 18 , 21 ] and meeting facilitation techniques [ 23 ] for these consensus-reaching discussions. We acknowledged the potential existence of additional factors influencing sustainability that may not have emerged during our interviews and also may vary substantially between sites. For example, adaptation of the CCM, characteristics of the patient population, and availability of continued funding, which are factors that extant literature reports as being relevant to sustainability [ 28 , 29 ], were not seen in our interview data. To maintain our analytic focus on the factors seen in our data, we did not add these factors to our analysis.

For the nine sites included in this project, we found the degree of CCM sustainability to be split evenly across the sites—three high-, three medium-, and three low-sustainability. Twenty-five total influencing factors were identified under the i-PARIHS domains of Innovation (6), Recipients (6), Context (8), and Facilitation (5). Table  2 shows these identified influencing factors by domain. Figure  1 shows 11 influencing factors that were identified for at least two sites within a group of high/medium/low sustainability sites—e.g., the factor “consistent and strong internal facilitator” is shown as being present at high sustainability sites with an enabling influence on sustainability, because it was identified as such at two or more of the high sustainability sites. Of these 11 influencing factors, four were identified only for sites with high CCM sustainability and two were identified only for sites with medium or low CCM sustainability.

figure 1

Influencing factors that were identified for at least two sites within a group of high/medium/low sustainability sites

Key trends in influencing factors associated with high, medium, and/or low CCM sustainability

Three factors across two i-PARIHS domains exhibited strong trends by sustainability status. They were the Collaborativeness and teamwork and Turnover of clinic staff and leadership factors under the Recipients domain, and the Having a consistent and strong internal facilitator factor under the Facilitation domain.

Recipients-related factors

Collaborativeness and teamwork was present with an enabling influence on CCM sustainability at most high and medium sustainability sites, while it was only somewhat present with a neutral influence on CCM sustainability at most low sustainability sites. When asked what had made their BHIP team work well, a participant from a high sustainability site said,

“Just a collaborative spirit.” (Participant 604)

A participant from a medium sustainability site said,

“We joke that [the BHIP teams] are even family, that the teams really do function pretty tightly and they each have their own personality.” (Participant 201)

At the low sustainability sites, willingness to work as a team varied across team members; a participant from a low sustainability site said,

“… I think it has to be the commitment of the people who are on the team. So those that are regularly attending, we get a lot more out of it than those that probably don't ever come [to team meetings].” (Participant 904)

Collaborativeness and teamwork of BHIP team members were often perceived as the highlight of pursuing interdisciplinary care.

Turnover of clinic staff and leadership was present with a hindering influence on CCM sustainability at most high, medium, and low sustainability sites.

“We’ve lost a lot of really, really good providers here in the time I’ve been here …,” (Participant 102)

said a participant from a low-sustainability site that had to reconfigure its BHIP teams due to clinic staff shortages. Turnover of mental health clinic leadership made it difficult to maintain CCM practices, especially beyond the teams that participated in the original CCM implementation trial. A participant from a medium sustainability site said,

“Probably about 90 percent of the things that we came up with have fallen by the wayside. Within our team, many of those remain but again, that hand off towards the other teams that I think partly is due to the turnover rate with program managers, supervisors, didn’t get fully implemented.” (Participant 703)

Although turnover was an issue for high sustainability sites as well, there was also indication of the situation improving in recent years; a participant from a high sustainability site said,

“… our attrition rollover rate has dropped quite a bit and I would really attribute that to [the CCM being] more functional and more sustainable and tolerable for the providers.” (Participant 502)

As such, staff and leadership turnover was deemed a major challenge for CCM sustainability for all sites regardless of the overall level of sustainability.

Facilitation-related factor

Having a consistent and strong internal facilitator was present with an enabling influence on CCM sustainability at high sustainability sites, not identified as an influencing factor at most of the medium sustainability sites, and variably present with a hindering, neutral, or unclear influence on CCM sustainability at low sustainability sites. Participants from a high sustainability site perceived that it was important for the internal facilitator to understand different BHIP team members’ personalities and know the clinic’s history. A participant from another high sustainability site shared that, as an internal facilitator themselves, they focused on recognizing and reinforcing the progress of team members:

“… I'm often the person who kind of [starts] off with, ‘Hey, look at what we've done in this location,’ ‘Hey look at what the team's done this month.’” (Participant 402)

A participant from a low sustainability site had also served as an internal facilitator and recounted the difficulty and importance of readying the BHIP team to function in the long run without their assistance:

“I should have been able to get out sooner, I think, to get it to have them running this themselves. And that was just a really difficult process.” (Participant 301)

Participants, especially from the high and low sustainability sites, attributed their BHIP teams’ successes and challenges to the skills of the internal facilitator.

Influencing factors identified only for sites with high CCM sustainability

Four factors across four i-PARIHS domains were identified for high sustainability sites and not for medium or low sustainability sites. They were the factors Details about the CCM being well understood (Innovation domain), Interdisciplinary coordination (Recipients domain), Having adequate clinic space for CCM team members (Context domain), and Having a knowledgeable and helpful external facilitator (Facilitation domain).

Innovation-related factor

Details about the CCM being well understood was minimal to somewhat present with an unclear influence on CCM sustainability.

“We’ve … been trying to help our providers see the benefit of team-based care and the episodes-of-care idea, and I would say that is something our folks really have continued to struggle with as well,” (Participant 401)

said a participant from a high sustainability site. “What is considered CCM-based care?” continued to be a question on providers’ minds. A participant from a high sustainability site asked during the interview,

“Is there kind of a clearing house of some of the best practices for [CCM] that you guys have … or some other collection of resources that we could draw from?” (Participant 601)

Although such references are indeed accessible online organization-wide, participants were not always aware of those resources or what exactly CCM entails.

Recipients-related factor

Interdisciplinary coordination was somewhat present with a hindering, neutral, or unclear influence on CCM sustainability. Coordination between psychotherapy and psychiatry providers was deemed difficult by participants from high-sustainability sites. A participant said,

“We were initially kind of top heavy on the psychiatry so just making sure we have … therapy staff balancing that out [has been important].” (Participant 501)

Another participant perceived that BHIP teams were helpful in managing.

… ‘sibling rivalry’ between different disciplines … because [CCM] puts us all in one team and we communicate.” (Participant 505)

Interdisciplinary coordination was understood by the participants as being necessary for effective CCM-based care yet difficult to achieve.

Context-related factor

Having adequate clinic space for CCM team members was minimal to somewhat present with a hindering, neutral, or unclear influence on CCM sustainability. COVID-19 led to changes in how clinic space was used/assigned. A participant from a high sustainability site remarked,

“Pre-COVID everything was in a room instead of online. And now all our meetings are online and so it's actually really easy for the supervisors to be able to rotate through them and then, you know, they can answer programmatic questions ….” (Participant 402)

Participants from another high sustainability site found that issues regarding limited clinic space were both exacerbated and alleviated by COVID, with the mental health service losing space to vaccine clinics but more mental health clinicians teleworking and in less need of clinic space. Virtual connections were seen to alleviate some physical workspace-related concerns.

Having a knowledgeable and helpful external facilitator was variably present; when present, it had an enabling influence on CCM sustainability. Participants from a high sustainability site noted how many of the external facilitator’s efforts to change the BHIP team’s work processes very much remained over time. An example of a change was to have team meetings be structured to meet evolving patient needs. Team members came to meetings with the shared knowledge and expectation that,

“… we need to touch on folks who are coming out of the hospital, we need to touch on folks with higher acuity needs.” (Participant 402)

Implementation support that sites received from their external facilitator mostly occurred during the time period of the original CCM implementation trial; correspondence with the external facilitator after that trial time period was not common for sites. Participants still largely found the external facilitator to provide helpful guidance and advice on delivering CCM-based care.

Influencing factors identified only for sites with medium or low CCM sustainability

Two factors were identified for medium or low sustainability sites and not for high sustainability sites. They were the factors Ability to continue patient care during COVID and Adequate resources/capacity for care delivery . These factors were both under i-PARIHS’ Context domain, unlike the influencing factors above that were identified only for high sustainability sites, which spanned all four i-PARIHS domains.

Context-related factors

Ability to continue patient care during COVID had a hindering influence on CCM sustainability when minimally present. Participants felt that their CCM work was challenged when delivering care through telehealth was made difficult—e.g., at a medium sustainability site, site policies during the pandemic required a higher number of in-person services than the BHIP team providers expected or desired to deliver. On the other hand, this factor had an enabling influence on CCM sustainability when present. A participant at a low sustainability site mentioned the effect of telehealth on being able to follow up more easily with patients who did not show up for their appointments:

“… my no-show rate has dropped dramatically because if people don’t log on after a couple minutes, I call them. They're like ‘oh, I forgot, let me pop right on,’ whereas, you know, in the face-to-face space, you know, you wait 15 minutes, you call them, it’s too late for them to come in so then they're no shows.” (Participant 102)

The advantages of virtual care delivery, as well as the challenges of getting approvals to pursue it to varying extents, were well recognized by the participants.

Adequate resources/capacity for care delivery was minimally present at medium sustainability sites with a hindering influence on CCM sustainability. At a medium sustainability site, although leadership was supportive of CCM, resources were being used to keep clinics operational (especially during COVID) rather than investing in building new CCM-based care delivery processes.

“I think that if my boss came to me, [and asked] what could I do for [the clinics] … I would say even more staff,” (Participant 202)

said a participant from a medium sustainability site. At the same time, the participant, as many others we interviewed, understood and emphasized the need for BHIP teams to proceed with care delivery even when resources were limited:

“… when you’re already dealing with a very busy clinic, short staff and then you’re hit with a pandemic you handle it the best that you can.” (Participant 202)

Participants felt the need for basic resource requirements to be met in order for CCM-based care to be feasible.

In this project, we examined factors influencing the sustainability of CCM-aligned care practices at general mental health clinics within nine VA medical centers that previously participated in a CCM implementation trial. Guided by the core CCM elements and i-PARIHS domains, we conducted and analyzed CCM provider interviews. Using MMCS, we found CCM sustainability to be split evenly across the nine sites (three high, three medium, and three low), and that sustainability may be related most strongly to provider collaboration, knowledge retention during staff/leadership transitions, and availability of skilled internal facilitators.

In comparison to most high sustainability sites, participants from most medium or low sustainability sites did not mention a knowledgeable and helpful external facilitator who enabled sustainability. Participants at the high sustainability sites also emphasized the need for clarity about what CCM-based care comprises, interdisciplinary coordination in delivering CCM-aligned care, and adequate clinic space for BHIP team members to connect and collaborate. In contrast, in comparison to participants at most high sustainability sites, participants at most medium or low sustainability sites emphasized the need for better continuity of patient-facing activities during the COVID-19 pandemic and more resources/capacity for care delivery. A notable difference between these two groups of influencing factors is that the ones emphasized at most high sustainability sites are more CCM-specific (e.g., external facilitator with CCM expertise, knowledge, and structures to support delivery of CCM-aligned care), while the ones emphasized at most medium or low sustainability sites are factors that certainly relate to CCM sustainability but are focused on care delivery operations beyond CCM-aligned care (e.g., COVID’s widespread impacts, limited staff availability). In short, an emphasis on immediate, short-term clinical needs in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and staffing challenges appeared to sap sites’ enthusiasm for sustaining more collaborative, CCM-consistent care processes.

Our previous qualitative analysis of these interview data suggested that in order to achieve sustainability, it is important to establish appropriate infrastructure, organizational readiness, and mental health service- or department-wide coordination for CCM implementation [ 10 ]. The findings from the current project augment these previous findings by highlighting the specific factors associated with higher and lower CCM sustainability across the project sites. This additional knowledge provides two important insights into what CCM implementation efforts should prioritize with regard to the previously recommended appropriate infrastructure, readiness, and coordination. First, for knowledge retention and coordination during personnel changes (including any changes in internal facilitators through and following implementation), care processes and their specific procedures should be established and documented in order to bring new personnel up to speed on those care processes. Management sciences, as applied to health care and other fields, suggest that such organizational knowledge retention can be maximized when there are (i) structures set up to formally recognize/praise staff when they share key knowledge, (ii) succession plans to be applied in the event of staff turnover, (iii) opportunities for mentoring and shadowing, and (iv) after action reviews of conducted care processes, which allow staff to learn about and shape the processes themselves [ 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 ]. Future CCM implementation efforts may thus benefit from enacting these suggestions alongside establishing and documenting CCM-based care processes and associated procedures.

Second, efforts to implement CCM-aligned practices into routine care should account for the extent to which sites’ more fundamental operational needs are met or being addressed. That information can be used to appropriately scope the plan, expectations, and timeline for implementation. For instance, ongoing critical staffing shortages or high turnover [ 34 ] at a site are unlikely to be resolved through a few months of CCM implementation. In fact, in that situation, it is possible that CCM implementation efforts could lead to reduced team effectiveness in the short term, given the effort required to establish more collaborative and coordinated care processes [ 35 ]. Should CCM implementation move forward at a given site, implementation goals ought to be set on making progress in realms that are within the implementation effort’s control (e.g., designing CCM-aligned practices that take staffing challenges into consideration) [ 36 , 37 ] rather than on factors outside of the effort’s control (e.g., staffing shortages). As healthcare systems determine how to deploy support (e.g., facilitators) to sites for CCM implementation, they would benefit from considering whether it is primarily CCM expertise that the site needs at the moment, or more foundational organizational resources (e.g., mental health staffing, clinical space, leadership enhancement) [ 38 ] to first reach an operational state that can most benefit from CCM implementation efforts at a later point in time. There is growing consensus across the field that the readiness of a healthcare organization to innovate is a prerequisite to successful innovation (e.g., CCM implementation) regardless of the specific innovation [ 39 , 40 ]. Several promising strategies specifically target these organizational considerations for implementing evidence-based practices (e.g., [ 41 , 42 ]). Further, recent works have begun to more clearly delineate leadership-related, climate-related, and other contextual factors that contribute to organizations’ innovation readiness [ 43 ], which can inform healthcare systems’ future decisions regarding preparatory work leading to, and timing of, CCM implementation at their sites.

These considerations informed by MMCS may have useful implications for implementation strategy selection and tailoring for future CCM implementation efforts, especially in delineating the target level (e.g., system, organizational, clinic, individual) and timeline of implementation strategies to be deployed. For instance, of the three factors found to most notably trend with CCM sustainability, Collaborativeness and teamwork may be strengthened through shorter-term team-building interventions at the organizational and/or clinic levels [ 38 ], Turnover of clinic staff and leadership may be mitigated by aiming for longer-term culture/climate change at the system and/or organizational levels [ 44 , 45 , 46 ], and Having a consistent and strong internal facilitator may be ensured more immediately by selecting an individual with fitting expertise/characteristics to serve in the role [ 15 ] and imparting innovation/facilitation knowledge to them [ 47 ]. Which of these factors to focus on, and through what specific strategies, can be decided in partnership with an implementation site—for instance, candidate strategies can be identified based on ones that literature points to for addressing these factors [ 48 ], systematic selection of the strategies to move forward can happen with close input from site personnel [ 49 ], and explicit further specification of those strategies [ 50 ] can also happen in collaboration with site personnel to amply account for site-specific contexts [ 51 ].

As is common for implementation projects, the findings of this project are highly context-dependent. It involves the implementation of a specific evidence-based practice (the CCM) using a specific implementation strategy (implementation facilitation) at specific sites (BHIP teams within general mental health clinics at nine VA medical centers). For such context-dependent findings to be transferable [ 52 , 53 ] to meaningfully inform future implementation efforts, sources of variation in the findings and how the findings were reached must be documented and traceable. This means being explicit about each step and decision that led up to cross-site analysis, as MMCS encourages, so that future implementation efforts can accurately view and consider why and how findings might be transferable to their own work. For instance, beyond the finding that Turnover of clinic staff and leadership was a factor present at most of the examined sites, MMCS’ traceable documentation of qualitative data associated with this factor at high sustainability sites also allowed highlighting the perception that CCM implementation is contributing to mitigating turnover of providers in the clinic over time, which may be a crucial piece of information that fuels future CCM implementation efforts.

Furthermore, to compare findings and interpretations across projects, consistent procedures for setting up and conducting these multi-site investigations are indispensable [ 54 , 55 , 56 ]. Although many projects involve multiple sites and assess variations across the sites, it is less common to have clearly delineated protocols for conducting such assessments. MMCS is meant to target this very gap, by offering a formalized sequence of steps that prompt specification of analytical procedures and decisions that are often interpretive and left less specified. MMCS uses a concrete data structure (the matrix) to traceably organize information and knowledge gained from a project, and the matrix can accommodate various data sources and conceptual groundings (e.g., guiding theories, models, and frameworks) that may differ from project to project – for instance, although our application of MMCS aligned to i-PARIHS, other projects applying MMCS [ 2 , 5 ] use different conceptual guides (e.g., Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research [ 57 ], Theoretical Domains Framework [ 58 ]). Therefore, as more projects align to the MMCS steps [ 1 ] to identify factors related to implementation and sustainability, better comparisons, consolidations, and transfers of knowledge between projects may become possible.

This project has several limitations. First, the high, medium, and low sustainability assigned to the sites were based on the sites’ CCM sustainability relative to one another, rather than based on an external metric of sustainability. As measures of sustainability such as the Program Sustainability Assessment Tool [ 59 , 60 ] and the Sustainment Measurement System Scale [ 61 ] become increasingly developed and tested, future projects may consider the feasibility of incorporating such measures to assess each site’s sustainability. In our case, we worked on addressing this limitation by using a consensus approach within our project team to assign sustainability levels to sites, as well as by confirming that the sites that we designated as high sustainability exhibited CCM elements that we had previously observed at the end of their participation in the original CCM implementation trial [ 19 ]. Second, we did not assign strict thresholds above/below which the counts or proportions of data regarding a factor would automatically indicate whether the factor (i) was present, somewhat present, or minimally present and (ii) had an enabling, hindering, or neutral/unclear influence on sustainability. This follows widely accepted qualitative analytical guidance that discourages characterizing findings solely based on the frequency with which a notion is mentioned by participants [ 62 , 63 , 64 ], in order to prevent unsubstantiated inferences or conclusions. We sought to address this limitation in two ways: We carefully documented the project team’s rationale for each consensus reached, and we reviewed all consensuses reached in their entirety to ensure that any two factors with the same designation (e.g., “minimally present”) do not have associated rationale that conflict across those factors. These endeavors we undertook closely adhere to established case study research methods [ 65 ], which MMCS builds on, that emphasize strengthening the validity and reliability of findings through documenting a detailed analytic protocol, as well as reviewing data to ensure that patterns match across analytic units (e.g., factors, interviewees, sites). Third, our findings are based on three sites each for high/medium/low sustainability, and although we identified single factors associated with sustainability, we found no specific combinations of factors’ presence and influence that were repeatedly existent at a majority of the sites designated as high/medium/low sustainability. Examining additional sites on the factors identified through this work (as we will for our subsequent CCM implementation trial described below) will allow more opportunities for repeated combinations and other factors to emerge, making possible firmer conclusions regarding the extent to which the currently identified factors and absence of identified combinations are applicable beyond the sites included in this study. Fourth, the identified influencing factor “leadership support for CCM” (under the Context domain of the i-PARIHS framework) substantially overlaps in concept with the core “organizational/leadership support” element of the CCM. To avoid circular reasoning, we used leadership support-related data to inform our assignment of sites’ high, medium, or low CCM sustainability, rather than as a reason for the sites’ CCM sustainability. In reality, strong leadership support may both result from and contribute to implementation and sustainability [ 16 , 66 ], and thus causal relationships between the i-PARIHS-aligned influencing factors and the CCM elements (possibly with feedback loops) warrant further examination to most appropriately use leadership support-related data in future analyses of CCM sustainability. Fifth, findings may be subject to both social desirability bias in participants providing more positive than negative evidence of sustainability (especially participants who are responsible for implementing and sustaining CCM-aligned care at their site) and the project team members’ bias in interpreting the findings to align to their expectations of further effort being necessary to sustainably implement the CCM. To help mitigate this challenge, the project interviewers strove to elicit from participants both positive and negative perceptions and experiences related to CCM-based care delivery, both of which were present in the examined interview data.

Future work stemming from this project is twofold. Regarding CCM implementation, we will conduct a subsequent CCM implementation trial involving eight new sites to prospectively examine how implementation facilitation with an enhanced focus on these findings affects CCM sustainability. We started planning for sustainability prior to implementation, looking to this work for indicators of specific modifications needed to the previous way in which we used implementation facilitation to promote the uptake of CCM-based care [ 67 ]. Findings from this work suggest that sustainability may be related most strongly to (i) provider collaboration, (ii) knowledge retention during staff/leadership transitions, and (iii) availability of skilled internal facilitators. Hence, we will accordingly prioritize developing procedures for (i) regular CCM-related information exchange amongst BHIP team members, as well as between the BHIP team and clinic leadership, (ii) both translating knowledge to and keeping knowledge documented at the site, and (iii) supporting the sites’ own personnel to take the lead in driving CCM implementation.

Regarding MMCS, we will continuously refine and improve the method by learning from other projects applying, testing, and critiquing MMCS. Outside of our CCM-related projects, examinations of implementation data using MMCS are actively underway for various implementation efforts including that of a data dashboard for decision support on transitioning psychiatrically stable patients from specialty mental health to primary care [ 2 ], a peer-led healthy lifestyle intervention for individuals with serious mental illness [ 3 ], screening programs for intimate partner violence [ 4 ], and a policy- and organization-based health system strengthening intervention to improve health systems in sub-Saharan Africa [ 5 ]. As MMCS is used by more projects that differ from one another in their specific outcome of interest, and especially in light of our MMCS application that examines factors related to sustainability, we are curious whether certain proximal to distal outcomes are more subject to heterogeneity in influencing factors than other outcomes. For instance, sustainability outcomes, which are tracked following a longer passage of time than some other outcomes, may be subject to more contextual variations that occur over time and thus could particularly benefit from being examined using MMCS. We will also explore MMCS’ complementarity with coincidence analysis and other configurational analytical approaches [ 68 ] for examining implementation phenomena. We are excited about both the step-by-step traceability that MMCS can bring to such methods and those methods’ computational algorithms that can be beneficial to incorporate into MMCS for projects with larger numbers of sites. For example, Salvati and colleagues [ 69 ] described both the inspiration that MMCS provided in structuring their data as well as how they addressed MMCS’ visualization shortcomings through their innovative data matrix heat mapping, which led to their selection of specific factors to include in their subsequent coincidence analysis. Coincidence analysis is an enhancement to qualitative comparative analysis and other configurational analytical methods, in that it is formulated specifically for causal inference [ 70 ]. Thus, in considering improved reformulations of MMCS’ steps to better characterize examined factors as explicit causes to the outcomes of interest, we are inspired by and can draw on coincidence analysis’ approach to building and evaluating causal chains that link factors to outcomes. Relatedly, we have begun to actively consider the potential contribution that MMCS can make to hypothesis generation and theory development for implementation science. As efforts to understand the mechanisms through which implementation strategies work are gaining momentum [ 71 , 72 , 73 ], there is an increased need for methods that help decompose our understanding of factors that influence the mechanistic pathways from strategies to outcomes [ 74 ]. Implementation science is facing the need to develop theories, beyond frameworks, which delineate hypotheses for observed implementation phenomena that can be subsequently tested [ 75 ]. The methodical approach that MMCS offers can aid this important endeavor, by enabling data curation and examination of pertinent factors in a consistent way that allows meaningful synthesis of findings across sites and studies. We see these future directions as concrete steps toward elucidating the factors related to sustainable implementation of EBPs, especially leveraging data from projects where the number of sites is much smaller than the number of factors that may matter—which is indeed the case for most implementation projects.

Using MMCS, we found that provider collaboration, knowledge retention during staff/leadership transitions, and availability of skilled internal facilitators may be most strongly related to CCM sustainability in VA outpatient mental health clinics. Informed by these findings, we have a subsequent CCM implementation trial underway to prospectively test whether increasing the aforementioned factors within implementation facilitation enhances sustainability. The MMCS steps used here for systematic multi-site examination can also be applied to determining sustainability-related factors relevant to various other EBPs and implementation contexts.

Availability of data and materials

The data analyzed during the current project are not publicly available because participant privacy could be compromised.

Abbreviations

Behavioral Health Interdisciplinary Program

Collaborative Chronic Care Model

Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research

coronavirus disease

evidence-based practice

Institutional Review Board

Integrated Promoting Action on Research Implementation in Health Services

Matrixed Multiple Case Study

United States Department of Veterans Affairs

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Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank the project participants for their time, as well as the project team members for their guidance and support. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the Department of Veterans Affairs or the United States government.

This project was funded by VA grant QUE 20–026 and was designed and conducted in partnership with the VA Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention.

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Concept and design: BK, JS, and CM. Acquisition, analysis, and/or interpretation of data: BK, JS, MB, SC, ES, and CM. Initial drafting of the manuscript: BK. Critical revisions of the manuscript for important intellectual content: JS, MB, SC, ES, HB, LS, KW, and CM. All the authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Kim, B., Sullivan, J.L., Brown, M.E. et al. Sustaining the collaborative chronic care model in outpatient mental health: a matrixed multiple case study. Implementation Sci 19 , 16 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-024-01342-2

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  • What can Safety Cases offer for patient safety? A multisite case study
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  • http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4981-1210 Elisa Giulia Liberati 1 ,
  • http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1979-7577 Graham P Martin 1 ,
  • http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9514-1890 Guillaume Lamé 1 , 2 ,
  • Justin Waring 3 ,
  • http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7356-5342 Carolyn Tarrant 4 ,
  • http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7886-3223 Janet Willars 4 ,
  • Mary Dixon-Woods 1
  • 1 THIS Institute (The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute), Department of Public Health and Primary Care , University of Cambridge , Cambridge , UK
  • 2 Laboratoire Genie Industriel , CentraleSupélec, Paris Saclay University , Gif-sur-Yvette , France
  • 3 Health Services Management Centre , University of Birmingham , Birmingham , UK
  • 4 Department of Population Health Sciences , University of Leicester , Leicester , UK
  • Correspondence to Dr Elisa Giulia Liberati, THIS Institute (Public Health and Primary Care), University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK; elisa.liberati{at}thisinstitute.cam.ac.uk

Background The Safety Case is a regulatory technique that requires organisations to demonstrate to regulators that they have systematically identified hazards in their systems and reduced risks to being as low as reasonably practicable. It is used in several high-risk sectors, but only in a very limited way in healthcare. We examined the first documented attempt to apply the Safety Case methodology to clinical pathways.

Methods Data are drawn from a mixed-methods evaluation of the Safer Clinical Systems programme. The development of a Safety Case for a defined clinical pathway was a centrepiece of the programme. We base our analysis on 143 interviews covering all aspects of the programme and on analysis of 13 Safety Cases produced by clinical teams.

Results The principles behind a proactive, systematic approach to identifying and controlling risk that could be curated in a single document were broadly welcomed by participants, but was not straightforward to deliver. Compiling Safety Cases helped teams to identify safety hazards in clinical pathways, some of which had been previously occluded. However, the work of compiling Safety Cases was demanding of scarce skill and resource. Not all problems identified through proactive methods were tractable to the efforts of front-line staff. Some persistent hazards, originating from institutional and organisational vulnerabilities, appeared also to be out of the scope of control of even the board level of organisations. A particular dilemma for organisational senior leadership was whether to prioritise fixing the risks proactively identified in Safety Cases over other pressing issues, including those that had already resulted in harm.

Conclusions The Safety Case approach was recognised by those involved in the Safer Clinical Systems programme as having potential value. However, it is also fraught with challenge, highlighting the limitations of efforts to transfer safety management practices to healthcare from other sectors.

  • Patient safety
  • Qualitative research
  • Risk management

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https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2023-016042

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WHAT IS ALREADY KNOWN ON THIS TOPIC

Safety Cases are a well-established regulatory technique in some areas, requiring organisations to make the case to the relevant regulator that they have put in place adequate measures to reduce risks in their systems to a level ‘as low as reasonably practicable’ (ALARP).

Importing of safety practices from other sectors has a long track record in healthcare, but little is known about the potential of the Safety Case approach when applied to clinical pathways.

WHAT THIS STUDY ADDS

It was difficult for clinical teams to use the Safety Case as intended (to show that risks had been reduced to ALARP), not least because they often identified issues that front-line staff could not address.

Safety Cases were sometimes used instead to attract senior leaders’ attention and to make the case for better support and resourcing, but some issues were beyond the control even of organisational leadership.

HOW THIS STUDY MIGHT AFFECT RESEARCH, PRACTICE OR POLICY

Safety Cases may have some potential in healthcare, but their optimal use in this sector may require modifications, particularly if they are considered for regulatory purposes.

Introduction

Patient safety remains a major challenge for healthcare, despite more than two decades of sustained policy, practice and research attention. 1 2 The initial enthusiasm for borrowing practices and methods from other safety-critical industries (such as aviation) at the outset of the patient safety movement 3–5 has been tempered by experience. 6–12 It is now widely recognised that attempts to transfer approaches between contexts require care and caution, and should be supported by theory and empirical evaluation. 13–15 This paper seeks to contribute to addressing this need through examination of an attempt to introduce into healthcare a specific safety approach—the Safety Case—that is already used in other industries (including oil, transport and mining) both as a regulatory technique, 16 and, more rarely, as a quality management approach without regulatory mandate (eg, in the automotive industry). 17 18

The specifics of the Safety Case approach vary between sectors and regulators, 19 but the general principles are listed in box 1 . In brief, a claim to operational safety is justified through a series of linked arguments that explain how safety has been secured, with supporting evidence , including the processes in place to control risk. Where used as a regulatory technique, Safety Cases are produced by organisations to ‘make the case’ to the relevant regulator that they have put in place adequate measures to reduce risks in a product or system to a level ‘as low as reasonably practicable’ (often abbreviated as ALARP). The regulator then reviews the Safety Case and either grants the organisation licence to operate, or may require further risk assessments, justification of the measures proposed or additional risk mitigations. 20

Typical features of safety cases

Safety Cases are developed to ‘make the case’ that risk has been reduced to a level ‘as low as reasonably practicable’ (ALARP). To do so, Safety Cases integrate various forms of prospective risk management analysis, based on the idea that operators are better placed than external regulators to assess risks in their own systems. The core of the Safety Case is typically a risk-based argument and corresponding evidence to demonstrate that all risks associated with a particular system have been identified, that appropriate risk controls have been put in place, and that there are appropriate processes in place to monitor the effectiveness of the risk controls and the safety performance of the system on an ongoing basis. 23

Safety cases typically contain:

A description of the system and its operational context;

How safe the system is claimed to be and the criteria by which safety is assessed;

How hazards have been identified and how the risks they pose have been assessed;

What kind of risk control measures have been put into place and why they are effective; and

Why the residual level of risk is acceptable. 23

Safety Cases are typically reviewed and assessed by an external regulator, for example, in the nuclear or petrochemical industries in the UK. However, some industrial sectors have also deployed the approach outside of a regulatory requirement. For example, the automotive industry uses Safety Cases that are part of the ISO26262 standard, but this is not mandated by regulators. 17 18

As an approach requiring organisations to proactively describe what procedures and actions they are putting in place to control risk, Safety Cases can be contrasted with prescriptive, compliance-oriented approaches, where organisations are required to show that they have met externally imposed safety standards. 21 Because they are written for a specific system and its context of use, they are intended to be more adaptable to specific situations than generic safety standards, and also more responsive to rapid change in technologies or practices. 22

On the face of it, the Safety Case would appear to have value as an approach to safety management in healthcare, particularly in its potential for prospective identification and control of risk. However, the Safety Case approach has only rarely been used in healthcare, and only in a very limited number of applications (eg, development of information systems and medical devices). 23 24 In this article, we develop an analysis of the application the Safety Case approach within the UK National Health Service (NHS) using a case study of the first documented attempt to apply the principles of the methodology to clinical pathways. As the approach was deployed outside a regulatory context, our analysis focuses on the transferability of an approach to risk management that is proactive, structured, and tailored in nature and that presents evidence about the safety of specific clinical systems and existing mitigations in a single ‘case’ document.

Case study: the Safer Clinical Systems programme

Our analysis draws on an evaluation we conducted of a programme known as Safer Clinical Systems, which is designed to improve the safety and reliability of clinical pathways based on learning adapted from a range of hazardous industries. It seeks to enable organisations to make improvements to local clinical systems and pathways through a structured methodology for identifying risks and re-engineering systems to control risk and enhance resilience. 25 26 Use of the principles of the Safety Case approach is a centrepiece of the Safer Clinical Systems programme, although outside a regulatory context.

Funded by the Health Foundation, the Safer Clinical Systems programme was developed by a team at Warwick University and tested over a number of phases. Following initial development, a ‘testing phase’ involving eight NHS hospital sites (seven in England, one in Scotland) ran from 2011 to 2014. An ‘extension phase’ (2014 to 2016) involved further work by five of these sites and one new site.

Each participating hospital site ( table 1 ) was required to establish a multidisciplinary clinical team. Sites in the testing phase were advised by a support team of clinicians and experts, received inperson training, had access to other resources (such as a reference manual and telephone support) and were required to report their progress regularly. Sites in the extension phase had less bespoke support and were expected instead to build on their previous learning.

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Sites involved in the programme

A requirement of participating teams was that they use the Safer Clinical Systems approach to proactively assess risks and hazards in their clinical pathways and that they produce Safety Cases at the end of their projects describing the risks and how they were being mitigated. The Safety Cases were expected to be similar in format to those used in other sectors, 27 comprising a description of the clinical pathway covered, the key hazards identified through structured analysis using prescribed tools, the risk controls implemented, and, critically, a ‘safety claim’ and associated ‘confidence argument’—a pronouncement on the current safety of the system concerned, and a statement explaining how risks had been made ALARP. Rather than being presented to an external regulator, as would be the case if the Safety Case were being used as a regulatory technique, the principal intended audience in this programme was the senior leadership (executive and board level) within organisations.

Evaluation methods

To study the testing and extension phases of the Safer Clinical Systems programme, we used a mixed-methods, longitudinal design, involving interviews, ethnographic observations, and documentary analysis across the nine participating sites. The analysis we report here is based primarily on interviews and documentary analysis. Ethnographic observations (over 850 hours) provided valuable data on how clinical teams carried out their Safer Clinical Systems projects in practice in the context of existing and competing demands, but are not reported in detail here.

Across the nine sites, we conducted 89 semistructured interviews in the testing phase and 39 in the extension phase with participating clinical team members and programme leaders. Sampling at the sites sought to purposefully include a range of different roles in the programme, including the clinical leaders of each project and others. We also conducted 5 semistructured interviews in the testing phase, followed by 10 in the extension phase, with organisational senior leadership, comprising executive team/board members. Interviews explored general experiences of the programme as well as specific exploration of using the Safety Case approach. Participants were informed of the aims and commissioners of the evaluation. All interviews were conducted by experienced social scientists using topic guides ( online supplemental material 1 ). Interviews were conducted either in person or by telephone, between November 2012 and June 2016, and were digitally audio recorded and then transcribed for analysis.

Supplemental material

Analysis, conducted by EL and guided by the wider team, was based on the constant comparative method 28 combining inductive and deductive approaches. We coded interviews and observations using an inductive approach, deriving codes directly from each interview and then progressively clustering codes in higher order categories and themes. To strengthen explanatory power, this inductive strategy was complemented by theoretical concepts drawn from the wider literature.

GL and EL conducted a documentary analysis of the Safety Cases prepared by the clinical teams ( table 2 ). We used recommendations and guidelines for writing and maintaining safety cases in other sectors, 29–31 to organise the Safety Cases’ content thematically, and identified their main strengths and weaknesses in terms of completeness, presence of appropriate evidence and analyses to support the claims, consistency with the site’s safety improvement objectives, readability, and presence of a safety claim and confidence argument.

Format and content of 13 Safety Cases reviewed

Finally, we organised our higher order themes and overall reflections using concepts and themes proposed by recent works on the topic. 19 32 Regular team meetings and correspondence provided oversight of the analytical approach, consistency and adequacy of codes, and reporting. Given the nature of the programme, we did not undertake a formal test for theoretical saturation for the interviews or the Safety Cases.

Across the testing and extension phases of Safer Clinical Systems, we undertook 143 interviews with participants across programme leadership, clinical teams and organisational leadership. We analysed 13 submitted Safety Cases; although 14 should have been developed, one site from the extension phase struggled to implement the programme in full and did not produce a Safety Case.

In presenting our analysis below, we consider, first, participants’ views on the Safety Case as a novel approach to understanding and managing safety risk in healthcare, and second, the work that went into developing Safety Cases. We then turn to the analysis of Safety Cases themselves.

Views on the value of safety cases

By the end of the programme, members of the project teams and senior leadership in the participating organisations had largely come to see the Safety Case as a valuable approach, with the potential to make hazards visible in an accountable, systematic and scientific way. The analytical steps required to compile a Safety Case, such as process mapping the patient pathway, were seen to be particularly useful in proactively identifying threats to safety, rather than reactively managing incidents once they had happened. The role of Safety Cases in enabling an overarching, system-wide view of the hazards, rather than focusing on what happens in particular segments of the pathway, was also welcomed. Broadly, teams valued the possibilities of new ways of thinking about risk.

I like the idea that you just have one document that you can hand to somebody and say how safe is your system. I like the concept that you can say ‘Well this is what our system is like just now’. (Project participant)

Some organisational senior leaders agreed, at least in principle, that Safety Cases could offer value, and recognised the importance of a prospective approach to safety.

We have immensely complex systems which could be simplified and therefore made a bit more reliable. […] So something which looks at that could certainly be a useful thing, because it’s saying ‘Well actually here is a little nest of complexity which you can reduce, but it’s also a significant risk to the patient, because you’re missing information or you’re hurrying things through.’ […] (Senior leader)

Other senior leaders, however, were not always clear on the practicalities of the approach, and some found it difficult to identify the added value of Safety Cases. They suggested, for example, that existing risk management tools performed very similar functions.

If you look at our risk register, mitigation is the last box, we spend a good amount of time on the other things, but if we were to spend any time on a particular risk it would be on mitigation […]. And so that sounds like a very similar process, and so I’m back to what the delineation is between Safety Case and risk register. (Senior leader)

Some project teams saw the Safety Case as useful for a secondary reason: that of securing the attention and interest of senior leaders in their organisations. Their hope was that, by providing new evidence and analysis of the riskiness of clinical systems, senior management attention, support, and resources might be solicited.

So they’ve [senior management] actually kind of bought into it, so I think they will feel pressure to deliver. (Project participant)

However, as we explain below, the exact fit of Safety Cases into the existing ecology of tools and documents in healthcare was not clear to all participants.

Preparing safety cases

Project teams were required to learn new techniques to prepare the Safety Cases, including use of systematic methods to identify and assess risks in their clinical pathways, to propose risk controls and to identify metrics that could be used to monitor systems. Production and communication of Safety Cases also required skills in making persuasive claims, structuring arguments and presenting evidence compellingly. The participating teams were, understandably, unfamiliar with many of these skills, and expressed uncertainties about the expected structure, content and style of the Safety Case itself, especially in terms of what issues to emphasise and how to evidence them. Participants described compiling and drafting the Safety Case as labour-intensive and difficult.

I think the other bit that we have been challenged by is the actual writing of the Safety Case and again it is because it is fairly new to healthcare in general. I think we are going to go through a few reiterations before we fully understand what it is and how to use it. (Project participant)

Notwithstanding the training and support received in the ‘testing’ phase, teams continued to report difficulties with preparing and drafting Safety Cases well into the extension phase. A recurrent source of ambiguity related to the size and scope of the clinical system that the Safety Cases should target. The first, diagnostic, step in the Safer Clinical Systems process involved defining the clinical pathway of focus. However, determining the boundaries of the pathway was far from straightforward. Furthermore, clinical pathways typically involved dozens of technological systems (eg, infusion pumps, IT systems) and sociotechnical processes (eg, guidelines, multidisciplinary meetings). Each might be amenable to risk assessment and management individually, but making sense of their connections, aggregate risks and potential interactions was a much more complex task.

It’s not a linear process and you do go back trying to understand another bit of the process that you thought you understood, but actually didn't as (…) you had hoped. (Project participant)

Once the pathways and their components had been determined (or at least approximated), project teams used a range of methods recommended by the Safer Clinical Systems programme, mostly derived from similar activities in other industries, to assess hazards and risks. The teams found the processes often challenging and time-consuming, with much discussion about the relative merits of different sources of data and evidence. Despite the challenges, teams generally concluded that conducting a systematic risk assessment using structured tools offered important new insights about clinical pathways.

What I’ve loved doing is, is talking to the staff and actually understanding what goes on, because it’s only when you understand what goes on that you can put it right… You’ve worked in the hospital for years and there’s still things you didn’t realise actually went on and things that people did that you didn't realise that they actually did. That was quite an eye-opener. (Project participant)

This new understanding through structured risk assessment enabled teams to identify multiple shortcomings that had potential to harm patients. The hazards they unearthed varied greatly in scale, level of risk posed and tractability to intervention. Some problems identified were amenable to resolution by the project teams, typically those with their roots in suboptimal service planning and pathway design, failures in communication among staff, or unclear distribution of responsibility or ownership of key processes. In response to these, most, but not all, sites designed or implemented some risk controls and documented them in their Safety Cases.

[Staff are] given the freedom and the autonomy to go ahead and do whatever things they think might be necessary to make things better. And that’s what people do, there is very much a culture of promoting change there, so they talked about small cycles of change, doing PDSA [Plan Dp Study Act] cycles, and there’s a number of different projects that are running (Observation notes)

The extent to which these risk control interventions were consistent with the principles of the Safer Clinical Systems programme varied by site. Some project teams were able to draw on extensive experience, while others foundered at this stage. Common to all sites, however, was the identification of issues that were well beyond the scope of control of the front-line teams themselves. These vulnerabilities tended to originate from deep-rooted institutional and organisational pathologies or constraints. The importance of these problems, including, for example, staffing levels, was beyond doubt. Exactly what to do about them was less clear. Some project teams made valiant attempts to at least mitigate the risks through local work, but others appeared to accept that standard quality improvement efforts would not solve the issues. Some teams described the ongoing failure to mitigate the risks in their Safety Cases, in part, as noted above, in the hope that action from senior level might be provoked.

There were other things that were discussed at the [meeting] that they thought would be good as a team to change… but with some of them, they just knew it would be impossible to do so, so actually they didn't even bother to write them down. (Observation notes) And the team very bravely went to the board and said, you know, our Safety Case is showing and we're telling you that our processes are unsafe, so it alerted people to the issues. […] So that was the strength of it. (Project participant)

However, as we now describe, for senior organisational leaders, both the imperative offered by the Safety Case and their own ability to act were less clear.

Content of, and responses to, safety cases

Our documentary review showed that submitted Safety Cases were highly variable in format and length ( table 2 ). Some were highly structured, clearly written and precise in the use of evidence; others were harder to follow, lacking in clarity and less well organised. Our review also found that the descriptive elements (analysis of risk and hazards) were much better achieved than the assurance components (the safety claim and the confidence argument). Indicative, perhaps, of the intractability to local-level intervention of some of the hazards uncovered, or the lack of expert safety science input in the project teams, most Safety Cases focused more on what had been done to determine the risk than on the level of safety that had been achieved in mitigating it. The documents also varied in the extent to which they reported the residual risks—those that remained despite the implementation of risk controls—in a clear and transparent way. For instance, one Safety Case noted that the diagnostic process had found 99 ways in which the pathway could fail, that the level of reliability in the microsystem remained lower than acceptable, and that radical re-design was needed. Others were more circumspect. Accordingly, while they documented sometimes-extensive mitigations, none of the Safety Cases could make an unambiguous safety claim supported by a powerful confidence argument. Some teams were not clear about how the evidence gathered and analyses conducted would contribute to the safety claim. Some sites listed project activities in lieu of offering an actual safety claim, reporting what they had done rather than the level of safety they had reached.

It was a useful, […] a really good repository for all the stuff we've done in the project, which I find really good. And has been good when people ask ‘What did you do?’ then you can say that this is what we did, so that’s useful. I'm not sure about whether people use it for what it is meant to be, which is to prove the pathway is now safe, I’m not sure whether it is used for that really. (Project participant)

Sometimes, safety claims were reported for each identified hazard (comparing levels of risk before and after the interventions they had implemented) rather than at the level of the clinical system. No site explicitly discussed whether risks had been reduced ‘as low as reasonably practical’. Some sites claimed improvements as a result of the interventions they had implemented, but these did not always stand up to statistical scrutiny. 33

The response of senior leadership to the Safety Cases submitted by teams varied. Some focused on the potential of the Safety Case for supporting organisational-level decision making in relation to risk reduction, resource allocation and strategic prioritisation.

I think it would be easier to respond to a Safety Case rather than more so the [other quality and safety] data I get. Because it’s back to first principles, what are we actually here to do… Then if we have an unsafe system everything else needs to fall in behind that, no matter cost pressures, no matter personal opinion, no matter all the other complexities in a big system. If an element is at risk, then that will always be made a priority. (Senior leader)

Not all senior leaders, however, were so confident that the insight offered by Safety Cases would or should inevitably lead to action. Some of the issues identified in the Safety Cases were beyond the ability not only of front-line teams to solve, but also of organisational leaders. Issues such as staffing levels, IT interoperability, and securing timely discharge required at least interorganisational coordination, resourcing, coordination, and support across the whole healthcare system. Additionally, the prevailing approach to risk management, and the perceived unavoidability of risks in the complex systems of healthcare, meant that the insights offered by a Safety Case might be unwelcome or not necessarily candidates for priority attention. In a system that relied primarily on retrospective risk management approaches, such as incident reporting and investigations, the need to tackle risks of recurrence (where problems had already manifested as serious incidents or ‘near misses’, and might do again) could easily take precedence over addressing seemingly ‘theoretical’ risks (problems identified through a detailed prospective analysis but yet to occur).

Because you’re saying actually ‘That was a potential harm on our risk management system, and we knew about it, and we were accepting that we don’t have enough money to address all of these issues at one time’. So there is, if you like, a prioritisation and rationing of where we put money according to the level of risk. […] It’s a bit like county councils putting crossings on roads, or a zebra crossing. You’re waiting for the fatality to occur before actually that will get the funding. (Senior leader)

Some feared that, given the legal obligation of boards to take action in response to safety risks that were revealed to them, an unintended consequence of the Safety Case approach might be to distract organisational focus from areas that were at least as worthy of attention but lacked the spotlight offered by the Safety Case. There was a perception that to have a Safety Case for every pathway or area of practice would likely be impossible, and that too many Safety Cases would be overwhelming.

The complexity of health care is such that there are hundreds of complex connected pathways that patients are on and so… You in theory could write hundreds [of Safety Cases] and that would then become meaningless because if you write hundreds no one would ever read them. So, I think it might be helpful in some specific examples… Rather than being something that could cover everything that we do to patients. (Senior leader)

Consequently, Safety Cases might serve not to assure about control of risks, but to unnerve—and unnerve leaders who were not always well placed to act, given the scope of their control and the other priorities they faced. In a system where Safety Cases were new, without an established function in safety management, and covering only a small proportion of safety-critical activity, the information they provided was not always readily actionable from a managerial perspective and, moreover, had potential to create uncontrolled reputational risk.

The danger is that what you have is a legal requirement to spend money on a Safety Case that actually is of low, relative risk to harms that are occurring in the absence of Safety Cases. So what you get is a spurious diversion of money to a wheel that has been made very squeaky, but actually isn’t causing harm… There’s the risk of diversion to get a perfect patch in one part of the system while everything else is actually terrible. (Senior leader) (A danger) is, you know, if it does get into the wrong hands, particularly with the media, because there’s not the openness and the ability to manage some of this data, which needs explanation. But we do pride ourselves on being a very open and transparent board. (Senior leader)

Our examination of an attempt to introduce the principles and methodologies of the Safety Case approach into healthcare suggests that the approach was broadly welcomed by participants in our study, but was fraught with challenge. In other sectors, the Safety Case rests on the ALARP principle. While the Safety Cases produced by participating teams in the Safer Clinical Systems programme did present proactive analyses of risks, they did not show that the risks in clinical pathways on which they focused had been reduced as far as reasonably possible. Instead, teams identified multiple residual risks that had resisted efforts at control and mitigation by the teams themselves. These findings emphasise the importance of careful consideration of context and implementation when transferring safety management approaches from one setting to another. 12 34–36 The evidence underlying other industrial risk management techniques (eg, Failure Modes and Effects Analysis, 37 ‘5 Whys’ 10 or Root Case Analysis 11 ) is also weak, but the regulatory function of Safety Cases warrants specific caution. Sujan et al ’s review of various sectors nonetheless concluded that even with the differences in regulatory context, healthcare organisations could benefit from using the Safety Case approach to develop understanding and exposition of their current levels of risk. 19 Our study does suggest that Safety Cases show some promise as a way of structuring more responsive, adaptable and specific proactive safety management practices in healthcare settings, but further careful development and evaluation are needed, particularly if consideration is given to using them for regulatory purposes. 19

An important feature of the programme we examined—essentially a feasibility study—was that the Safety Case approach was being used outside the regulatory frameworks and infrastructures characteristic of use of the technique in most other sectors. Without an external regulatory requirement to satisfy, participating organisations in the Safer Clinical Systems programme may not have felt a strong imperative to make the responses that might otherwise be expected; absent the spectre of regulatory action, senior leadership may not have felt compelled to reduce the risks ALARP. However, even when Safety Cases are part of a regulatory framework, they are not always rigorous or successful in controlling risk 38 or showing they have been reduced ALARP. 39 While our study does not allow conclusions to be drawn about what might happen if Safety Cases were included in a regulatory regime in healthcare, it does allow insights into the nature of the challenges that might be anticipated should regulators consider introducing the approach in healthcare settings.

Some of the challenges we identified arose from the mismatch between the complexity and interdependencies of clinical pathways, with their often unbounded character, and the more tightly defined (and often more mechanical or technical) applications of the approach in other industries. 22 40 Future research might usefully clarify whether and how the scope of a Safety Case could best be defined for healthcare settings, noting that the highly dynamic and interdependent nature of multiple subsystems of care may defy attempts to impose clear boundaries. These kinds of questions are becoming increasingly prominent in safety science as recognition grows that the development of networked complex systems (eg, unmanned aircraft systems) requires a shift from relatively static prelaunch assessment to a dynamic approach that can accommodate changes in the system’s properties and behaviour during its life-cycle. 41 42

Other challenges arose in the demanding nature of the expertise, skill and time commitment required to engage in the tasks of conducting safety analyses, identifying and testing risk controls, and compiling a Safety Case. The variable quality of the Safety Cases submitted by clinical teams in this programme is likely to be linked to variable competencies and available capacity. In contrast, in safety-critical industries where these risk assessment techniques originated, the design of effective risk controls is the responsibility of safety/reliability engineers with extensive training and expertise. For healthcare, use of the Safety Case approach will require additional resource and new dedicated roles with specific expertise, rather than relying on making further demands of existing clinical teams. 40 43 The resourcing implications of a wholesale effort to shift the regulatory system and culture of an entire sector could, however, be enormous, especially given the volume and complexity of activity in healthcare and the number of diverse clinical pathways.

An additional set of challenges was more cultural in character, and related to the revelatory potential of the Safety Case. On one hand, participants—especially clinical teams—appreciated the value of the Safety Case in offering a proactive, prospective and rigorous approach to identifying safety risks. Some also saw it as a means of attracting managerial attention and obtaining resources. 44 But leaders in organisations were not always convinced that the approach offered much that was new, suggesting that more evidence would be needed to demonstrate the added value of Safety Cases—especially in moving beyond description to solution, 45 and adding value over current approaches such as risk registers. A further concern at the leadership level was that it was unclear whether areas that did have a Safety Case should be considered to have a stronger warrant for action than those that did not. A framework for supporting prioritisation of risks is likely to be helpful in any future use of Safety Cases. However, current tools, such as risk matrices, may be flawed, 46 47 so better tools should be investigated.

Even less tractable was what to do about some of the problems reported in the Safety Cases. Clinical teams had done their best to implement risk controls where they could, but they did not have sufficient power and access to resources to address those that were institutional or structural in character. They therefore often fell back on weaker administrative measures, like training or procedures. 8 Yet organisational leaders were often similarly challenged, given their limited capacity and resources for radical systems re-design, improved staffing, IT infrastructure, or other major re-engineering or influencing of activities outside the organisation itself. These findings are indicative of broader problems with the selection of risk controls in health services 44 48 that may need to be addressed before Safety Cases could achieve their potential.

Our study has a number of strengths, including its in-depth, mixed-methods, longitudinal design with engagement both with the project teams and senior leaders in organisations. It was limited in its ability to assess the impact of the Safety Case approach in improving safety, not least because of issues with data on processes and outcomes. 33

Conclusions

The Safety Case approach offers promise in principle as a safety management approach in healthcare, but substantial challenges need to be addressed before further deployment, particularly in regulation. Further experimentation with the use of Safety Cases in healthcare might therefore more profitably focus on how to make the most of their assets—including the new insights offered by prospective, system-wide risk analysis—while managing their potential unintended consequences.

Ethics statements

Patient consent for publication.

Not applicable.

Ethics approval

This study involves human participants and was approved by the East Midlands – Leicester Research Ethics Committee (12/EM/0228). Participants gave informed consent to participate in the study before taking part.

Acknowledgments

We thank the people from the nine sites who participated in the Safer Clinical Systems programme and the support team. We also thank colleagues on the evaluation team, including Sarah Chew, Liz Shaw, Liz Sutton, and Lisa Hallam.

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Supplementary materials

Supplementary data.

This web only file has been produced by the BMJ Publishing Group from an electronic file supplied by the author(s) and has not been edited for content.

  • Data supplement 1

Twitter @graham_p_martin, @carolynctarrant

Contributors EL and GL produced the first draft of the article, subsequently revised by GM, JWa, and MD-W. EL and JWi collected the data, analysed by EL and GL. All authors contributed to data interpretation, manuscript writing and reviewing, and approved the final version. MD-W was the study Chief Investigator and study guarantor.

Funding This study was funded by the Health Foundation, charity number 286967. The Healthcare Improvement Studies (THIS) Institute is supported by the Health Foundation – an independent charity committed to bringing about better health and health care for people in the UK. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Health Foundation.

Competing interests None declared.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Supplemental material This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content. Where the content includes any translated material, BMJ does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the translations (including but not limited to local regulations, clinical guidelines, terminology, drug names and drug dosages), and is not responsible for any error and/or omissions arising from translation and adaptation or otherwise.

Linked Articles

  • Editorial Changing the patient safety mindset: can safety cases help? Mark Sujan Ibrahim Habli BMJ Quality & Safety 2023; 33 145-148 Published Online First: 24 Nov 2023. doi: 10.1136/bmjqs-2023-016652

Read the full text or download the PDF:

More From Forbes

Has zoom abandoned its ‘frictionless’ mission.

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Zoom took over video calls and meetings during the pandemic. It was already surpassing its much bigger, far better-financed competitors even before shutdowns began. When IT departments were faced with onboarding hundreds or thousands of employees connecting from home for the first time, they went with the solution that was easiest: Zoom. Compared to other platforms, users could be up and running on Zoom with minimal support needed.

During the pandemic, Zoom became the default choice for video conferencing.

Zoom’s Original Mission: Make Communications Frictionless

Zoom’s focus on effortless onboarding and user experience paid huge dividends during the pandemic. Their already brisk pace of growth skyrocketed as the overall use of video conferencing exploded. Zoom became the default choice and their brand became the generic term for video calls. Everyone was on a “Zoom” call, likely wearing a “Zoom shirt.”

The pandemic greatly accelerated Zoom's revenue growth

Zoom’s revenue in the second quarter of 2021 more than tripled its revenue from the final quarter of 2020. Growth continued at a slower but still strong pace through 2021. By 2023, growth had leveled out. Considering the gains Zoom made when in-person meetings were impossible, maintaining revenue is actually a significant win.

Declining Emphasis on “Easy”

I’ve championed Zoom’s corporate commitment to an effortless experience around the world since they became a case study in how eliminating friction drives high performance. But, my own confidence was shaken after a few experiences that were far from frictionless.

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In one case, I was about to join a remote conference to give a presentation on, ironically, the importance of reducing friction. With minutes to go, I found I had somehow been logged out of the Zoom app. I ended up in an authentication nightmare in which Zoom kept emailing me codes but gave me an error each time I entered it. I have no idea what the actual problem was, with all the errors and “resend code” messages it’s possible I got out of sequence.

I eventually worked around the problem with another device and joined the meeting late - hardly a good look for the “frictionless” guy.

Zoom User Experience Teardown

I filed that unfortunate experience away as an anomaly, although I continued to encounter occasional glitches with the Zoom app - notably, unexpected logouts or software updates at inopportune times.

With today’s frequent video calls, my expectation is that connecting will be no more difficult than answering my desk phone or placing a call on my mobile. It shouldn’t be necessary to allow extra time to be sure everything is working.

Then, I found out I wasn’t alone in seeing an uptick in Zoom friction.

User experience expert Peter Ramsey performed a detailed analysis of Zoom’s user experience and the results shocked me. The upstart company built around “frictionless” was now more effortful than its big-name competition.

Dark Patterns?

User experience experts call something a “dark pattern” if an element in the UX pushes the user in a direction favorable to the company but perhaps disadvantageous to the individual. An example would be a publication that lets you subscribe with a few clicks but requires you to call a customer service phone number to unsubscribe.

Zoom doesn’t do anything that egregious, but they DO push you to use their app rather than the simpler method of connecting through your browser. Typically, on a PC or Mac your calendar item or email meeting link will be viewed in your browser. Rather than encouraging you to simply open the meeting in your browser, they make opening the Zoom app the obvious action choice. My experiences with authentication issues and updates all came when I opened the app in preparation for a meeting.

Zoom's prompt steers users toward launching their app by minimizing the visibility of the browser ... [+] option

Ramsey thinks Zoom’s making the “join with browser” option much less visible qualifies as a dark pattern.

Click Friction

Equally surprising is Ramsey’s finding that starting a meeting in Zoom’s browser interface takes six clicks compared to two for Google Meet and three for Microsoft Teams.

A few clicks may not seem consequential, but they are. Amazon thrived for years in part because its One Click patent forced competitors to have one more click in their checkout process.

In-Meeting Friction

Ramsey looks at a variety of tasks that commonly occur in meetings, like screen sharing and adding/inviting people to the meeting. He finds that Zoom makes these functions less visible and easy to use than they could be.

If you have a problem, don’t expect Zoom to guide you out of trouble. Instead, Ramsey notes, they give you a popup to submit a bug report.

“Limitless Human Connection” (Really?)

After my own effortful experiences and reading Ramsey’s report, I wondered how Zoom squared this situation with its stated mission of, “Making Communications Frictionless.” I’ve quoted this mission statement innumerable times to companies trying to increase revenue and customer loyalty, and used Zoom’s explosive growth to show it works.

In particular, I point out the clarity this mission statement gives every Zoom employee, whether they are in product design, compliance, IT or any other function. Any proposed change to the customer experience must be measured against the mission: will it make things easier, or add friction?

I visited Zoom’s website and was surprised one more time. Their old “frictionless” mission statement is gone. The new mission statement is, “One platform delivering limitless human connection.”

Zoom's new mission statement eliminates "frictionless communication" in favor of "limitless human ... [+] connection."

This bland, mostly meaningless statement is problematic. The “one platform” element is, perhaps, the driving force behind forcefully pushing users into the Zoom app. Even worse, “limitless human connection” provides no clarity to anyone who works at Zoom. Will a change to the user experience create limitless connection between humans? Who knows? (But, probably not.)

But Wait, There’s More

Confusingly, Zoom has also borrowed a tagline/mission from another “Z” company, Zappos. In larger type than their actual mission statement, their “About” page states, “Zoom is dedicated to delivering happiness...” and mentions customers, communities and teammates. A fine sentiment, to be sure, but one that provides little practical guidance.

Zoom has also adopted a "delivering happiness" tagline/mission

Mission Not Accomplished

Years ago, an American president famously declared, “Mission accomplished” prematurely. The war had barely begun.

It seems that Zoom has made the same error - prematurely declared victory in its battle against friction. They have moved on to more grandiose goals, even as friction festers and grows in the absence of sustained focus on minimizing customer effort.

If Zoom really wants to achieve its long-term goals, the company needs to get back to basics and reinstate its goal of making communications frictionless. I’m confident that they can do this. Zoom’s new mission isn’t the result of being acquired by a corporate monolith. The architect of the original mission, Eric Yuan, is still CEO. Odds are Yuan won’t let the company deviate too far from its “frictionless” path.

Roger Dooley

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Disasters Forced 2.5 Million Americans From Their Homes Last Year

Many of those displaced also reported food shortages and predatory scams, according to new data from the Census Bureau.

A lot filled with debris from a destroyed home, including broken stairs, pipes, fixtures and cinder blocks, on a sunny day. In the background, a few intact homes and trees.

By Aidan Gardiner

An estimated 2.5 million people were forced from their homes in the United States by weather-related disasters in 2023, according to new data from the Census Bureau.

The numbers, issued on Thursday, paint a more complete picture than ever before of the lives of these people in the aftermath of disasters. More than a third said they had experienced at least some food shortage in the first month after being displaced. More than half reported that they had interacted with someone who seemed to be trying to defraud them. And more than a third said they had been displaced for longer than a month.

The United States experienced 28 disasters last year that each cost at least $1 billion . But until recently, the number of Americans displaced by those disasters has been hard to estimate because of the nation’s patchwork response system.

Understanding the human toll of disasters, not just the financial costs, is increasingly urgent as climate change supercharges extreme weather, experts say.

“A lot of people’s lives are disrupted by these events in small and large ways,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit group that focuses on advancing upward mobility and equity. “It has a really big cumulative cost that’s hard to capture. This, at least, gives us a snapshot of that.”

The displacement data were gathered in the bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, which aims to measure how emerging social and economic challenges are affecting Americans. The survey added questions about disasters in December 2022.

Those first results , issued in January of 2023, showed that about 3.3 million people had been displaced in the year before. According to the latest batch of responses, collected in January and early February, 2.5 million said they had been displaced at some point last year.

The change from year to year is very likely a normal fluctuation, experts said, and may also reflect some limitations of the survey.

Different versions of the survey are sent periodically by text message and email to more than a million households at a time. The survey is self-reported and takes about 20 minutes. The number of people who respond can vary from about 40,000 to 80,000. The Census Bureau then assigns weights to the responses to make them representative of the broader population.

The Census Bureau notes that “sample sizes may be small and the standard errors may be large.” But experts say the results still provide some of the best available numbers on displacement.

“It’s a bit of a grain-of-salt number,” said Dr. Rumbach, who holds a Ph.D. in city and regional planning. “But at the same time, it’s a data set in a world where we don’t have a lot of good data sets.”

Hurricanes remained the most commonly cited cause of displacement, followed by floods and fires. Florida, Texas, California and Louisiana all had hundreds of thousands flee their homes.

A precise count of those displaced by disasters has been elusive because responding agencies and nonprofit groups only know how many people they serve, which leaves out displaced people who do not ask for help and communities that do not receive help at all. For example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency only responds to events that get a federal emergency declaration.

“That’s only a small portion of overall disasters,” Dr. Rumbach said. As an example, he pointed to floods that wreck a handful of homes and other so-called “ low attention disasters ” that often affect more rural communities. “There’s no incentive for people to add up all of those,” he said.

But the Pulse survey tries to do that, Dr. Rumbach said, even though some researchers are wary about drawing very broad conclusions.

“The concepts themselves — What is a disaster? What is displacement? — are really left open to the interpretation of the survey respondent,” said Elizabeth Fussell, a professor of population studies at Brown University.

The survey lists fire among the “natural disasters” that could lead to a displacement, for example, and some experts say it is not hard to imagine someone selecting that after a house fire. Dr. Fussell also noted that while earlier federal surveys counted those who had permanently moved from their homes after a disaster, “displacement” in the pulse survey could refer to a daylong departure.

While respondents can opt to say they “never returned” to their homes, experts cautioned that the short-term nature of the survey might make the true number of permanently displaced people hard to discern.

The data also show that the people facing the worst disaster outcomes tend to be from communities with less political power and who are subject to discrimination. Black people and Latinos tend to be displaced most often, and poorer people tend to be displaced for longer, experts said. That is amplified for people in those groups who also identify as L.G.B.T.Q., according to one analysis .

“There are many federal agencies that are very well aware that climate change is happening and that it will manifest as weather-related disasters,” Dr. Fussell said. “There’s a need to understand the scale of those.”

Learn More About Climate Change

Have questions about climate change? Our F.A.Q. will tackle your climate questions, big and small .

New satellite-based research reveals how land along the East Coast is slumping into the ocean, compounding the danger from global sea level rise . A major culprit: overpumping of groundwater.

The planet needs solar power. Can we build it without harming nature ? Today’s decisions about how and where to set up new energy projects will reverberate for generations.

Carbon-free electricity has never been more plentiful, but it hasn’t yet been enough to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. We looked at how electricity generation has changed over time to help you understand today’s global picture .

Singapore is rethinking its sweltering urban areas to dampen the effects of climate change. Can it be a model for other cities ?

Whether you’re looking to make your home more energy-efficient, install solar panels or buy an electric car, this guide can help you save money and fight climate change .

Did you know the ♻ symbol doesn’t mean something is actually recyclable ? Read on about how we got here, and what can be done.

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    Background The Safety Case is a regulatory technique that requires organisations to demonstrate to regulators that they have systematically identified hazards in their systems and reduced risks to being as low as reasonably practicable. It is used in several high-risk sectors, but only in a very limited way in healthcare. We examined the first documented attempt to apply the Safety Case ...

  27. Generative AI Trends And Use Cases To Follow In 2024

    Generative AI is poised for continued advancement in 2024. According to McKinsey, the technology could contribute up to $4.4 trillion annually across 63 use cases. That said, most businesses are ...

  28. Has Zoom Abandoned Its 'Frictionless' Mission?

    In one case, I was about to join a remote conference to give a presentation on, ironically, the importance of reducing friction. With minutes to go, I found I had somehow been logged out of the ...

  29. Disasters Forced 2.5 Million Americans From Their Homes Last Year

    Many of those displaced also reported food shortages and predatory scams, according to new data from the Census Bureau. By Aidan Gardiner An estimated 2.5 million people were forced from their ...