Alliant Energy
An energy producer and provider that services more than 950,000 electric customers and 410,000 natural gas customers. The Alliant website is designed for three types of users: visitors in the residential, commercial and farming markets.
Team size: 12. Timeline: 6 months. Website Redesign
My role: Lead Interactive Designer
Alliant Energy is looking to overhaul their website to meet the WCAG 2.0 AA standard for users with accessibility needs and to increase understanding of products and services throughout all channels. Our team looked at the motivations and backgrounds of all user groups and how they currently solve problems. Some of the tasks monitored included: user account management, viewing & paying bills, reporting outages, starting/stopping service, and submitting forms. Our findings assisted in determining how we can help Alliant Energy best support users through these actionable items.
Key Skills/Methods of Practice
• Research and analysis
• User interviews
• User testing
• Comparative analysis
• Design iterations
• Designer and developer collaboration
• Managing multiple tasks in tight timelines
• Leading a team through multiple project phases
Project and Solution Overview
We created a living prototype that incorporated changes based on extensive user-testing. For testing we conducted five user interviews and surveys and monitored user service logs to discuss current customer pain points (All participants who previewed the website redesign rated their Overall Experience as 4/5, “Good”)
What I Learned
How to create a comprehensive system of design components and start thinking about their impact on multiple user groups, how to think on my feet and make quick but supported decisions, how to work the values of multiple stakeholders into the elements needed for a complex and high-traffic website.