Energy website uplift: Improving access and quality of outage information

Project Overview

A large energy distributor’s website had fallen behind practices of other competitors with a fragmented digital experience, lack of self-service capabilities and an unscalable information architecture.

Project Outcome

A visually refreshed website that allowed the client’s diverse range of customers to easily navigate and find relevant content.

My Contributions

As part of a larger design team, I worked collaboratively with other designers to rapidly design, test and iterate large sections of the website. I helped facilitate large research and design workshops with client stakeholders and synthesised findings into actionable insights.

My main focus and responsibility on this project was to re-design and improve the most trafficked part of the website - the outage tracker feature. I lead multiple customer interviews, gaining valuable insights into user’s needs, wants and pain-points which helped ensure that my designs were accessible and informative, helping customers get information quickly during a power outage and reducing inbound calls to the customer help line.

The customer experience for the outage tracker was driven from qualitative research - in total 22 business stakeholders and 7-end customers. The interviews I conducted, as well as competitor analysis helped inform my design. It was clear from talking to end customers they were incredibly frustrated by the lack of information and navigational ability of the website to access updates, especially when experiencing frequent power outages in their area. They were desperate for a simple tool to use, with the most important information clearly surfaced upfront.
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Key features of my design:

• Simple and clear search entry point

• Dynamic and interactive map overview of current outages in the network

• Separation of current and upcoming outages

• Key information of each outage displayed on cards

• Key frequently asked questions surfaced, plus a link to more support content and contact details.