Southern California EdisoN
Creating a consolidated outage tool
Southern California Edison has power outage information scattered across a handful of pages. We were asked to improve how SCE’s customers access up-to-date information about power outages by integrating several existing outage maps into one mobile-friendly, WCAG compliant, interactive map experience. Additionally, we needed to educate users on what type of outage customers are experiencing, when power will be restored and increase opt-ins for outage notification alerts.
Challenge
I was responsible for establishing the information hierarchy, creating hi-fidelity wireframes, building prototypes and managing the design system. I worked closely with an account manager, visual designer, producer, client and developers. I led the technical conversations with the development team and produced the specifications and documentation needed for production.
Team and Role
During a power outage, SCE Customers want to know what type of outage they may be experiencing, when their power may be restored and what resources are available. Prior to this project, customers were forced to navigate through a convoluted network of pages (shown below) to find the information needed.
High bounce rates implied that users struggled to find what they needed. During a wildfire, the bounce rate increased by 1.2% and the customers visited an average of 8.35 pages before getting to the outage information (1.5x the amount during non-wildfire times).
understanding the problem
Doing a thorough audit the current outage pages was crucial in understanding what content to keep, where information was redundant, how to address the needs to all use cases, and how to streamline the process.
One of the major challenges with consolidating the outage pages was having multiple data feeds come together as one seamless experience. Seemingly simple design solutions weren’t feasible due to the complexities and limitations of how the data was organized. Proposing ideas that simplified the user experience, such as interacting with the list view to yield a result on the map view, posed great challenges and required creative solutions.
Consolidating content Effectively
Design challenges
Customers experiencing a power outage will reach to their mobile devices as their primary source of information. We understood that users might have limited cellular reception, so it was important to build a lightweight page that would get users information as quickly and easily as possible. With this in mind, plus the limited real estate available on mobile, we prioritized showing the list view of the outages versus the interactive map. We needed to make our page ADA friendly for those that may be visually impaired or using screen readers, so it was imperative that the content in the list view communicated the same information as the map.
Mobile First and Ada-friendly
To ensure our designs were meeting users’ needs and usable, we conducted usability testing with a small sample size via zoom. We primarily asked users to think aloud and perform a handful of tasks, like searching for outage statuses at a specific address, identifying available resources provided by SCE during an outage, and reporting an outage. Overall, users found the map useful and intuitive. They were able to accomplish the tasks asked of them, however we made a few design tweaks to address some of the feedback received and improve the tool’s usability.
Validating our designs
Results
Our new consolidated outage map tool is meeting business goals with higher page engagement and over 80% of all engaged visits viewing outage status details. The search bar feature yielded the highest interaction rate, followed by the list of outage information. To no surprise, users on mobile devices engaged with the search bar at a higher rate than those on desktop. Further down the page, SCE customers are able to learn more about the different outage types, resources available during outages, sign up for outage notifications and report outages more easily.
Performance
The SCE Outage Map was a gold MarCom award winner in the Digital Media/Web Interactive Capabilities category.
Recognition
“A functional consolidated outage map has been a dream of sce for years. It’s exciting to see it up and running. The map is the product at sce i am most proud of being able to be a part of bringing to life. it wouldn’t be what it is without all of you!”
— Frank Starke, Sr. Digital Product Manager, Customer Experience at Southern California Edison