Portland General Electric Reimagine Consumer Experience
Duration
Jan 2020 - March 2020
Location
Noida (India)
Domain
Energy Consumers
Responsibilities
Visual Design, Interactive Prototype, and Usability Test.
Tools
Adobe XD, and Online Usability Tool.
Project Brief
Consolidate separate residential and business account sites into a shared platform with a modern design that reduced customer friction across key journeys.
Project Challenges
PGE sought to expand their customer relationships ”beyond the bill” and improve self-service to build brand loyalty and reduce the cost to serve. Their target timeline for the entire project was just 3 months.
Solution
The older design was outdated and shows inconsistent use of design patterns. We found multiple issues while doing the Heuristic Evaluation by our 3 experts. We had to keep a large number of customers (8,81,788) in mind while designing the final solution with the approach of "Relation Beyond the Bill".
We applied a Design Ops* model to meet PGE’s aggressive timeline and deliver the following:
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Heuristic Evaluation
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Journey Workflows and Wireframes
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Visual Design
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Design System and Pattern Library
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Interactive Prototypes
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User Testing
I joined the team when we had Heuristic Report, Journey Workflows, and Wireframes to craft the final solution. I started my work with Hi-Fidelity Visual Designs, then Interactive Prototypes, and finally Usability tests with an expert.
*Design Ops refers to the orchestration and optimization of people, processes, and craft in order to amplify design’s value and impact at scale.
DESIGN
Final Outcome
As I said earlier, the older design was outdated and inconsistent. I started my work building Design Language System (DLS) and Patterns to keep the site lighter and consistent. I used card patterns to group the content on transactional pages.
Brand Colors, Iconography, and Card Layout
You can see a sample of our DLS and Pattern Library below. We also designed multiple other components.
Final Design
The final outcome was consistent, easy to use, and intuitive. You can have a look at the below screen or can explore the Live Site.
TEST
Usability Testing Report
To test the design and scenario flow of the new designs we made for PGE website and get user feedback on the look and feel of the prototypes (Outage Scenario) we run the usability test. We measure user's ease of use, efficiency, and satisfaction for performing the given tasks.
We did this Usability Study with www.usertesting.com with a total of 8 participants (between ages 18 – 65 years).
Final Summary:
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Overall, users thought that it was very easy, straightforwardand intuitive to report an outage.
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They liked the fact that they were able to do it right from thehome page and also receive a success notification for reportingthe outage.
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Users really liked the idea of being able to report an outagewithout even being signed in; they also liked that it was very quick and easy to accomplish the task at hand.
