Barwon Water

The opportunity: To create an intuitive, self-serving experience for Barwon Water customers, help Barwon Water be more profitable, and be an industry leader in the utilities sector.

The challenge: Barwon Water’s site was outdated, not responsive and didn’t have a strong content focus. The customer self-service experience was confusing, hard to find and not user friendly. Barwon staff members were overloaded with capturing and organising customer information, as well as processing payments. In addition, they wanted to communicate and highlight initiatives in the region, and become a community leader, rather than just be a utility company.

The approach:

We ran two stakeholder workshops, whereby business objectives and user groups were established. We then identified the top user tasks and mapped relevant content to them. We also reviewed analytics from the current site, to help us understand common user patterns and pain points.
We conducted a content audit of the current website. This involved examining every page of the site and analysing the site structure and information hierarchy. We subsequently consolidated pages, retired unnecessary content and developed a new, user-friendly information architecture.
We conducted an extensive technical discovery, to understand the complexities of the customer registration and payment process, as well as the back-end management of customer accounts and billing.
We ideated and sketched solutions to key interface opportunities.
We consolidated our best ideas and created greyscale concepts to present to the client and to use for user testing.
An extensive interface design system was created along with high-fidelity designs of key pages.

Features based on user research:

A new, quick-and-seamless registration, payment and sign-up process for customers.
Strategically placed quick links and key content for easy discovery.
A new information architecture for easy navigation.
A beautiful and detailed customer account dashboard with stylised data charts, clear information, and simple calls to action for key functions such as setting up direct debit.
A thoughtful sub-navigation system for unique content pages such as water supply.
A series of custom form elements were designed to accommodate the high number of customer forms.
A fully responsive experience.
A fully Accessible WCAG AA compliant site.