UTILITY PROVIDER
Designing a mass communication tool to ensure power delivery for years to come
UTILITY COMPANIES provide essential services to communities and neighborhoods night and day. Even a brief power outage means no lights, heat, internet, or life saving devices.
This utility company, located in a region highly prone to hurricanes and flooding from the Atlantic gulf, began a multi-year effort to weather-proof their services to prevent power outages.
This weather proofing — achieved by taking traditionally placed overhead power lines and burying them deep in the ground— requires placing more frequent breaker boxes around cities, and most invasively, digging up the yards of private residences and businesses to place power lines.
My team was tasked with expanding the current project management application, TracPro, to include communication features to interface with customers and streamline the undergrounding process.
To get a handle on the breadth of the project, I dove into stakeholder interviews. We spoke with 4 utility company employees involved with communications, and 8 contractor partners, which quickly revealed the complexity of the project.
DISCOVERY
The utility company used a mailing vendor for fulfillment of communications. The mailing vendor not only required notice far in advanced as well as the excessive lag time to achieve fulfillment.
Excessive Lag Time to Fullfillment
TracPro supported multiple roles and permissions, but these were not clearly defined, not extensively developed, and the utility company was hesitant to give more access to their contractor partners despite placing undue pressure on their small internal communications team.
Multiple Views for Permissions
Maintaining an up-to-date directory of impacted individuals and tracking complaints was near impossible with with the current system which impacted the efficiency that communications could be sent to customers.
Poor Tracking of Impacted Individuals
Of those contractor partners, adoption of TracPro had been slow, as the perceived usefulness of the application in day-to-day activity was low. Additionally, the utility company which owns TracPro, was reluctant to give out many accounts to the application.
Slow TracPro Adoption
The utility company actually contracted out the under grounding work to multiple contractor partners. More so, each had their own process for working with the customers that would be impacted by the undergrounding construction (referred to as “impacted individuals.”)
Disparate Contractor Processes
The process of sending out a communication to inform impacted individuals of the construction progress was extremely time consuming and unnecessarily complex. It was a process that also ultimately relied on a single senior manager stepping in and hand addressing letters when things went wrong— which was often.
Inefficient Communication Process
User Interview Artifacts
With information from our user interviews, we developed three key personas: communications team (SPP Communications), contractor partners, and project planners. I also mapped out the structure of TracPro with a site map to visualize where the new features would be housed.
To further discuss concerns of the stakeholders, we met with the utility company on-site to conduct a workshop and roundtable discussion. We learned about the needs and goals of the stakeholders and were able to prioritize features that would make the employee’s lives significantly easier.
Client Workshop
“Getting mailers out to the homes of impacted individuals is basically a formality at this point. By the time the first construction notice is delivered to homes, we’re usually already into phase two or three of construction.”
“We have great relationships with our contractor partners, but it’s still difficult to get them to keep us informed of the one-on-one conversations they’re having with impacted individuals out there in the field.”
“The only real way our customers can lodge a complaint unless they walk up to a worker in the field is to email our undergrounding email address. We have a system of color coding and archiving within the shared mailbox, but it’s pretty difficult to go back and match up a complaint again if the same person reaches back out.”
“Tracking down communications, fielding customer complaints, and liaising with contractor partners takes up way too much of my time, and is taking my attention away from my primary responsibilities. I’m supposed to be worrying about leading our corporate communications strategy and am putting postage on individual letters.”
“Right now we are using an excel document in SharePoint to track our communications, and it’s sometimes an arduous task to ensure I’m looking at the most up to date information.”
Taking all information from the user interviews and workshop, we distilled down the primary concerns into 6 epics. These represented the high level workflows conducted within a system and the set of features required to complete the activity.
Workshop Results
View Customers / Impacted Individuals in TracPro - User’s ability to see who is impacted by LUG projects
Initiating Proactive Communications - User’s ability to proactively request communications be sent to customers / impacted individuals
Managing Reactive Communications - User’s ability to track customers and impacted individuals inquiries and complaints from initiation through resolution
Reporting for Communications - User’s ability to view metrics regarding proactive and reactive communications at the project, status, and CP level
Global Search Capabilities - User’s ability to search for customers and projects
Notifications in TracPro- Users are notified of upcoming communications benchmarks for LUG projects and any assigned customer inquiries / complaints
*Please Note - All 6 epics were designed and developed during this project. All 6 were necessary as features tied into one another for complete functionality. However, for the purpose of this case study, I am focusing on the three specifically related to communications
To further illuminate what each communication epic would entail, we listed out the essential features necessary for each and confirmed with our stakeholders.
In addition, we developed several preliminary user flows to illustrate where and how a user would complete some of these actions.
Communication Epics & Features
Initiating Proactive Communications
Initiate requests for proactive communications at the project level
View Sent and not sent proactive communications in project overview
Ability to select specific impacted individuals to receive communications
View all proactive communications requested at the impacted individual level
Managing Reactive Communications
Create an interaction with an individual impacted by a project
Provide update(s) to an interaction with an impacted individual
Ability to see all unresolved interactions for a project
View all reactive communications at the impacted individual level
Reporting for Communications
Overview of communication activities by status and or/ CP on the TracPro dashboard
Overview of communications activities on the project overview
Ability to view all open inquiries and complaints
Ability to export communication reports
Visibility into a vendor scorecard
DESIGNING
With our epics established, I got into a fast paced cadence of developing several user flows weekly to present on Fridays to our client.
I worked from an existing design system in figma, so was constantly showing relatively high fidelity mockups. Any feedback or additional technical considerations discussed in our weekly meetings I would incorporate usually resulting in at least two iterations of each user flow.
I also worked in lockstep with a business analyst who helped keep track of feature requirements, and our team’s lead developer that would warn of technical limitations and backend considerations.
User Flows: Send a Communication, Approve a Communication, Update an Escalation
The way the undergrounding work progresses, communications with customers is always associated with a particular undergrounding project, denoted by the PRE number.
So, in order to send a communication associated with an undergrounding project, it was the natural choice to create a new communication tab that would appear with every new undergrounding project.
Send a Communication
Within this communication page there are several notable design decisions:
In the blank table there is informational copy and a synching icon to inform the user that sending communications is not yet available. This tab is not available until the impacted individuals list has been successfully uploaded. (The impacted individuals tab is also a new project tab that we fully designed prior to the communications tab for this reason.)
Two tabs within the page— one for “Proactive Communications” — communications that the utility company is sending to customers— and “Escalations” — to track concerns submitted from customers.
There are summary metrics at the top of the tab to draw attention to items that need attention and remain visible when switching between the "Proactive Communications” and “Escalations.”
Once the communications tab is available
The four required communications out of the possible nine for each project populate the table, and the option to “Create Communication” becomes available. This serves as a subtle reminder that these must be sent throughout the project lifecycle.
“Creating a Communication” opens a modal and guides the user through a workflow to select the type of communication, the individuals to receive it, and a summary page to review prior to submitting.
Approve a Communication
From the home page, a manager can approve communications that were submitted from contractor partners. We added a new pending approval widget to the home page and resized the other widgets. This view is unique to the manager permissions.
While it was emphasized over and over that the main goal for the utility company was reducing the complexity to send a communication, they still were hesitant to hand over the ability for contractor partners to send out communications themselves.
For this reason, every work flow required at least two different views— one program manager and one contractor partner. Program managers would not have to go through an approval process when sending communications, but contractor partners would only be able to submit for approval, with the program managers ultimately hitting send.
Update an Escalation
On the escalation tab within the communication page you can see an overview of all of the outstanding customer escalations. (An escalation is the term the utility company used to refer to customer inquiries.) It was important that all communication be housed in the same section to have all communication history available when resolving customer complaints.
Add a new escalation
Update an escalation by clicking the table
The option to hide previously resolved escalations
The option to export a record of escalations to CSV
TO CONCLUDE
It is estimated that in the first year of implementation, the company will save over 5 million dollars in labor hours through streamlined internal and external communication processes to expedite undergrounding.
During this project, in addition to the three user flows highlighted above, I led the delivery of 35 total user flows to account for the various permission levels, all actions associated with sending communications, and additional necessary flows such as managing impacted individuals, managing in app and email notifications, bulk uploading projects, following projects, and global search capabilities.
The application is now a much more comprehensive tool equipped to faciliate communicate between the utility company and their customers.
Additional project activites I completed..
Running User Testing & Writing Usability Report
QA Testing in Development & Azure Devops
Writing Copy & Designing Notification Emails
Updating Design System in Figma with New Components
