A Design Strategist, CX/UX Strategist
PROJECT TYPE:
Conceptual design, recommend approaches for EPCOR's website redesign.
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PROJECT DURATION: Two Months
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MY ROLE:
UX Strategist, Facilitator, Workshop designer, SOW writer
THE CHALLENGE:
The challenge was recommending a new strategy and approach for website redesign to gain a deep understanding of EPCOR's users, their needs, and EPCOR's problems.
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CLIENT: The Edmonton Power Corporation
CREDIT: Yellow Pencil Inc
Research and Planning
Project Description
During the conceptual design phase, my team and I focused on gaining an in-depth understanding of the users' pain points and frustrations while using EPCOR's website, as well as identifying the critical business problems that needed to be addressed. By conducting various activities, we gained insights into the users' needs and expectations, which helped in recommending a solution that addressed their problems and improved their overall experience. These activities helped the Yellow Pencil team to identify the most pressing issues and create a solution that is tailored to the needs of both the users and the business.
Following extensive collaborative sessions with EPCOR's stakeholders and senior leadership, we successfully pinpointed the primary issues and developed a profound comprehension of the challenges faced by EPCOR, including user frustrations and systemic business limitations.
High-level Problems
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Users looking to access information pertinent to their location on EPCOR.com are arriving at pages which provide information tailored to another location.
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Users looking to log into their online portal when navigating from Google may end up in one of the site’s regions, which is not appropriate for their needs.
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Other issues include the user being served a blank page as the site uses "regional text blocks," meaning Google indexes the whole page, sees there's related content, thinks it's helpful, sends them to it, and then the IP detection doesn't serve them anything because the location doesn't match.
Key Problems:
After brainstorming and many discussions to better understand the key pieces of EPCOR’s website and services that need to be addressed individually, we identified key problems. The key problems we are addressing are
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Water services in Arizona
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Starting and modifying services in Ontario
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Power services in Alberta with different providers
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Encor & Fortis
Scenarios Based on Locations
While there are many scenarios that showcase problems with the epcor.com experience, we identified six scenarios that represent these fundamental digital customer experience issues.
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The six scenarios we focused on are:
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Arizona, USA — New customer looking for the rates in their district are unsure of what location they live in as categorized by the EPCOR website.
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Oswego, Oregon — Non-customer is looking to find corporate information unrelated to their location.
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Toronto, Ontario — EPCOR customer who doesn’t know they need to change their location to see the content they need.
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Brockton, Ontario — A prospective customer who lives in an area EPCOR is expanding their services to.
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Edmonton, Alberta — Potential Encor customer looking for more information.
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Strathmore, Alberta — EPCOR customer looking for power outages on the EPCOR website.
Current State User Journey Maps
Next, we took a closer look at the previous six scenarios and refined them into user journeys. These user journeys were influenced by the scenarios along with past research material.
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User journey maps allowed us to explore the website from the point of view of users experiencing issues on the site. This enabled us to see pain points along the journey and helped us make informed decisions about the next phase of the project.
We identified which issues are related to content or design, and which are related to location and technology issues.
Our Solution & proposed strategy
Multi-Site Manager
To best meet EPCOR's business and UX, our team recommended the multi-site approach. A Multi-Site approach refers to a software tool or platform that allows the management of multiple websites or digital properties from a single instance. A Multi-Site approach is beneficial for organizations that have multiple websites or digital properties that need to be managed and maintained.
With a Multi-Site manager, EPCOR can easily share and reuse content across multiple sites, ensuring consistency and reducing the time and effort required to manage various content pools individually.
The Approach
• Rewrite and recreate content in AEM
• Create child sites (regional pages) and content layers
• Publish content relevant to regions on regional sites
• Localize content from global site onto regional sites
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The issues with the current site can be placed into two categories: content and location. The solution presented here covers the issues related to location. The issues related to content are covered in the next phase of the project through content modelling, information architecture, and design. The multi-site solution for EPCOR was arrived at through an analysis of information provided by EPCOR, and an evaluation of the merits of this approach for dealing with websites in various locations.
How the Multi-Site could work for EPCOR
Architecture Framework
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The overall architecture of the EPCOR's family of websites is illustrated in the diagram below. This diagram shows EPCOR.com as the global master with content, pages and assets created at that level being shared across the Canadian and US fragments and those fragments sharing content to the regions included within them.
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Content Structure
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The following diagram shows a possible content structure for the back end of the future site content. The image shows websites in Global, Edmonton and Regina.
Concept Validation Activities
5WH Questions
We’re moving ahead with the multi-site approach because it will improve and reduce many of EPCOR’s current website issues; we looked at why this concept is appropriate and determined the details. The two methods we used are “5W1H” and “SWOT analysis.” ​
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In 5WH, we discussed the Benefits of implementing a Multi-Site approach with EPCOR's team and how we could adopt a Multi-Site approach from a content and design perspective to the new EPCOR website.
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By implementing a Multi-Site approach, the EPCOR site can be localized for each region, providing relevant content and addressing search engine results challenges while also ensuring that the site is scalable and easy to navigate for users.
SWOT Analysis
After conducting a SWOT analysis activity, we identified potential weaknesses and threats associated with implementing the Multi-Site approach, which we then used to evaluate our concept.
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By analyzing these factors, we were able to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the potential challenges that may arise and develop strategies to address them.
This allowed us to refine and improve our concept, ensuring that it is robust and effective in addressing the needs of the EPCOR website.
EPCOR's Multi-Site Maneger Diagram
This solution allows EPCOR.com to remain the hub for corporate content and news, which will be specifically assessed in the content audit. The local sites can house information relevant to their regions as well as information unique to that region. This will allow for content to be created at a "global" level and then localized at a regional level to meet the needs of each region.
Future State User Journey Maps
All of our discoveries thus far led to this activity: future state user journey mapping. These user journey maps work to illustrate how the outstanding pain points could be solved and serve as a recommendation.
