Unifying the Utility Experience
Unifying complex utility municipalities into a single customer experience
The Challenge Part 2
Client’s utility reach included six states with various regulatory policies in both residential and business (non-residential) sectors. They had acquired and merged another utility business and at the time had two web sites with fragmented content and structure. Customers were commonly confused by regulated and non-regulated content within state/municipal regions. There was also significant confusion between the sites on product availability and marketing offers available to them. Product offering were highly confusing in the business sector of their website since small business and larger enterprises had no structure to the various business goals.
Duke Energy Marketing Director
“We are challenged to find a balance between meeting heavily regulated municipality service contracts while serving a better customer experience.”
Approach Part 2
Stakeholder Interviews
Identify Personas within customer segmentations
Content Audit
Marketing and Metrics Audit
Card Sort prep, polling
Card Sort Quantitative Analysis
Site Map (Preliminary IA) and stakeholder socialization
Wireframes with stakeholder alignment
Navigation Models and feedback
Finalize Site Map
Finalize Wireframes and socialize
Identified Customer Goals
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Make it easy, relevant
Don’t force me to continuously navigate through your complex policies and municipal services. Once I identify my region, serve only what is relevant to me. Provide relevant content to my area.
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Create discovery
Help me discover content to what I am try to solve. Create prompts that allow me to learn more. When I am trying to understand my bill, help me understand how I can also lower it.
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Provide expert guidance
Provide me greater intelligence in terms that don’t require me to be a scientist or engineer. Help me understand why my bill is higher in the summer so that I’m more informed how to improve my efficiency.
Business Goals
- S. Santos, Group Design Director, Accenture/Fjord Design and Innovation
“Josh was instrumental in putting together and leading stakeholder meetings that were essential to moving the project forward. He demonstrated a strong understanding of the UX material and was able to act like a true SME during this engagement. His recommendations and guidance were readily accepted by the client and met with satisfaction. With a brief project window, Josh was able to make a tremendous impact on the client. It was a pleasure working with Josh and I would do so again in a heartbeat.”
Unified Information Architecture Level 1 - 2
Unified Residential and Non-Res
Regional/State Architectures Level 1 - 4 with Account Portal
Voice of Customer research showed residential to large businesses had an expertise spectrum needs that the site design had to reflect.
Delivery
Upon leveraging significant qualitative and quantitative customer research across various states, I unified a site-wide architecture across all markets with UX and content templates. This connected the customer research on how customers and businesses preferred to search and navigate the website. Content assessment and strategy were aligned to the experience.
