Designing Aurora Energy’s electrical outage communications for 87,000+ customers

Overview

Aurora Energy supports the electricity infrastructure that provides 1,300 gigawatt hours per year to more than 87,000 customers in Otago, New Zealand. A lines company is responsible for maintaining the safety and reliability of the network, connecting new customers, and upgrading the network to meet the growing needs of the community. Aurora Energy’s most critical role is fixing electricity outages and keeping the public informed as this happens. As part of a wider website redesign project, we designed an outages map that serves as a vital public communications tool.

Challenge

Aurora Energy faced overwhelming customer service calls during outages while under public and media scrutiny for infrastructure reliability. Customers needed accurate, accessible information during emergency situations, often on mobile devices when power outages prevented computer access.

My role

I was the lead designer, running the discovery and design phases of the project. I worked with a design colleague during the visual identity design, and worked closely with the lead developer, the API developer and the client to create the map solution.

Solution

In addition to the wider website re-design, I designed an interactive, mobile-first outages map that provided key information on current, planned, and restored outages. Comprehensive interviews with 8 key stakeholders from the customer panel ensured perspectives from a wide range of users. This research then informed the iterative design of the outages map and also enabled refined crafting of the UX and interactions through usability testing. The map provides universal accessibility with an easy-access list view and a drawer providing progressive disclosure of information.

Impact

• Customer service calls regarding outages were significantly reduced including the elimination of media enquiries.
• Critical communications to 87,000+ customers during power emergencies with mobile-first accessibility and design suitable for a wide range of users.
• Industry-leading outages map that sets a New Zealand standard for information provided to customers and the public.

Research

I designed and led comprehensive research, including 8 stakeholder interviews across diverse user groups (residents, business owners, contractors, older adult advocates), website analytics analysis, and customer service data review.

Interview findings

• Dealing with a power outage is often the only time the customer deals with Aurora Energy directly, this interaction often determines their opinion of Aurora Energy.
• Customers understand that fixing outages or creating connections to the grid can be time consuming or difficult. People are forgiving of this, but get frustrated when the information is inaccurate, not updated, missing or misleading. They want to be able to get the answer without going round in circles.
• People want clarity! They want to know if things have changed instead of feeling crazy if an outage alert just disappears.
• Knowing planned outages ahead of time allows people to plan and deal with the situation.
• Knowing about changes, even bad ones, are important.
• Users will most often be checking outages on their phone - because if there is an outage, they can’t use their computer.

“The only time I have interacted with Aurora was when I had a planned outage.”

Aurora Energy Customer

Data findings

We obtained website analytics data, search data and also customer service log data. Overall, this data highlighted the importance of outages.

• Outages represent a third of the pages visited. Outside of the homepage, no other page gets more than 5% of traffic.
• Towns and suburbs information was heavily visited and we also saw this in the search results. Locally relevant information was important.
• Faults (outages) were the single highest logged call type from the call center, and these requests overwhelm Aurora Energy’s call centre - particularly when there is a wide-spread outage.

Competitor research

We reviewed a number of other Outage page offerings from competitors within New Zealand. One of the requirements given to us was that the outages information must be displayed as a map, a common tool provided by competitors, with some competitors only showing a list of outages. With the list displays, they were either too large and hard to scroll through or far too dense and not enough descriptive information until you opened the outage. The maps were often opened in a separate link, while this provided the ability to have a full page map and a separate application, it meant that the outage information was not directly accessible on the homepage. Splitting between current and planned outages was common, as was providing notices to customers that there were no active outages.

Personas

In order to communicate and validate findings with wider internal stakeholders, my colleague and I conducted a persona workshop, covering the range of Aurora Energy’s diverse users.

Some key personas were ‘Concerned Cathy’ and ‘Sally with a small business’. A key theme for both of these users was that they needed certainty - outages could be planned for, but they needed to know when they were happening and if things changed.

Design ideation

Design strategy

Enable customer self-service before, during, and after outages to redirect Aurora’s resources from repetitive enquiries to supporting at-risk customers during emergencies. Customers should be provided with the information required to plan, make informed decisions, and understand a changing situation.

User journeys and first concepts

The experiences of our customer panel formed the requirements for our user journeys. Some examples would be a residential user having an unplanned power outage, a business owner planning for future outages that might affect their business or a farmer noticed a damaged power line on their property and taking safe action.

These wireframes show some key steps from the user journey where a residential customer just had an unplanned power outage, so are using their phone to check if the outage applies to their address. We wanted the outages to sit on the home page, so all users would find it with a single page load.

Accessibility first

Accessibility becomes ever more important in a crisis, and embedded maps don’t provide an acceptable experience for accessibility. All outage information would also be displayed in a list view, which not only gave an accessible option, it also provided an easily scannable list for all users.

The inclusion of a list view influenced how the widget would be structured regarding access between the map and list. A map/list toggle was implemented, so users could both clearly see the state they were in and also what options they had. The toggle layout then influenced further decisions about where UI elements such as search, outages tabs and legends were placed.

Embedded map interactions

Unlike standalone mapping applications, our outage map needed to function within Aurora’s website as a content block, creating unique interaction design constraints for emergency information access.

I evaluated three approaches for displaying outage details: modals, popups, and drawers. Modals disrupted users’ spatial context during crisis situations, while popup interactions created problematic nested complexity within the embedded map environment. The drawer approach proved optimal, providing an immediate outage preview while progressive disclosure allowed detailed information access without users losing their map orientation or page context, crucial for emergency decision-making when cognitive load is elevated.

Brand implementation

Visual design direction

Drawing on the direction set by Aurora Energy and the findings from customer interviews we developed a design brief to create a shared vision for the website. Some key factors were:

• Clear website design to emphasise professionality and access to critical services.

• The website needs to communicate the excitement and innovation happening with sustainable energy. It should positively frame the solutions Aurora Energy are coming up with.

• Aurora Energy needs to communicate its dynamism, professionality and approachability

I provided the client with a range of visual directions from friendly and bright to more professional or minimal. The client opted for leaning on a more professional style such as D3 and D5.

After working on these initial designs, I passed the visual direction onto a design colleague who created concepts for the next level of detailed design. Our direction introduced a navy blue and light grey to form the UI skeleton, with bright orange to provide focus and also tie back to the brand.

Validation

Drawing from the customer panel who undertook the original interviews, I conducted six moderated usability tests across a range of key scenarios. We wanted to see how users would understand the division between outage types, what users expect from search, how grouped outages would be understood.

Testing learnings

• The list view wasn’t as highly used as map. However, it still needed to be there as an alternative.

• Users were concerned about zooming in and getting caught too zoomed in. We added a zoom out button.

• The list view could become quite an undistinguishable list of street names. Adding suburb fields to each outage provided the user with contextual information if that outage was near them.

• When using the drawer, some users didn’t realise that they could open it further. We added ‘see more’ text adjacent to plus icon so users would understand they could expand it. This particularly helped older users that were less familiar with web icons and interactions.

Outcomes

Aurora Energy have had a lot of successful feedback with their customer base following the website re-design and new outages map. Many of the map successes were built on having a strong working relationship with the lead developer, allowing us to iterate on many small UX choices that add up to the whole experience. Additionally, being able to work directly to the requirements of the API ensured design choices reflected the realities of the supporting technology.

Impact

• Customer service calls for outages significantly reduced.
• Elimination of media enquiries for outages due to easy access via map.
• Critical communications to 87,000+ customers during power emergencies with mobile-first accessibility and design suitable for a wide range of users.
• Industry leading outages map that sets a New Zealand standard for information provided to customers and the public.

Map designs