Government & Public Utilities
Jacana Energy
Website and customer service portal requirements and design
About the client
Jacana Energy is the NT's largest electricity retailer, providing electricity retail services for residential, small and large commercial customers throughout the urban, rural and remote areas of the Northern Territory. The organisation was shifting to a 'digital first' way of operating, looking to improve customer service and interactions through digital channels – involving the redesign of their existing public-facing website and the completion and release of a secure customer account portal.
Approach and solution
Jacana Energy contracted Zuni to gather requirements and develop solution designs for a brand new public-facing website, and to review and make recommendations for a customer portal that was currently being developed.
The process involved two phases.
The first phase involved a series of co-design workshops with the Jacana internal teams to identify the audience groups that needed to engage with the website and customer portal, and to document what each of these groups wanted from Jacana – and Jacana from them. These audience definitions were then used as a basis for the collective development of user stories. Zuni used these user stories to develop a comprehensive requirements document that all stakeholders had directly contributed to.
Customer-centric design and testing
The second phase involved a customer-centric design cycle with testing throughout each iteration:
- An initial sitemap developed from open card sort results with both residential and business customers using Optimal Sort
- The sitemap was then tested on a separate cohort of customers using TreeJack to validate whether users could find key content
- A full, clickable prototype – covering both website and customer portal – was developed in Axure and tested on customers via the Loop11 platform to validate page compositions and functional elements
- Once the prototype was completed, a full formal functional specifications document was created, allowing Jacana Energy to go straight to tender for the build
Results
The process resulted in all internal stakeholders understanding the rationale behind the completed requirements through their direct involvement in phase one. Phase two provided sufficient customer-centric testing to validate design decisions in a way all stakeholders could understand and refer back to.
The combined outputs gave Jacana a solid set of requirements and full frontend solution design for the new website, an interim release of the customer portal, and a full customer portal solution to be released in parallel with the new site.
The project also delivered a deeper understanding of their customers and how they relate to the business as a whole – and identified additional opportunities to provide better customer service.
Services involved