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. The organisation was shifting to a “digital first” way of operating, and was looking to improve customer service and interactions through digital channels. This involved 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 review and make recommendations for a customer portal that was currently being developed.
The process that Zuni took 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 (e.g. “I want to pay online so that I can pay at my own convenience”). Zuni used these user stories to develop a comprehensive list of website and customer portal requirements that informed the second phase.
The second phase involved a customer centric design cycle that included customer testing throughout each iteration. These iterations included:
- An initial sitemap developed off open card sorts results from both residential and business customers using Optimal Sort
- The initial site map was then tested on a separate cohort of customers (business and residential) using TreeJack to test if users could find key content
- A full, clickable prototype (website and customer portal) was then developed in Axure. This prototype was also tested on customers using the Loop11 platform to validate the page compositions and functional elements
Once the prototype was completed, a full formal functional specifications document was created to allow Jacana Energy to go straight out to tender for the build.
Results
The process that Zuni took Jacana Energy through resulted in all internal stakeholders understanding the rationale behind the completed requirements through their direct involvement in phase one. Phase two displayed sufficient customer centric testing to validate design decisions that all stakeholders could understand and refer back too.
The combined outputs of the project gave Jacana a solid set of requirements and full frontend solution design for the new website, an interim release of the customer portal (to be release with the current site) and a full customer portal solution to be released in parallel with the new site.
The process also delivered a deeper understanding of their customers and how they relate to the business as a whole and additional opportunities to provide better customer service.