The ACS website did not do a good job of Summarizing brand advantages, or generating dialogues between the customer and ACS, or even differentiating itself from competitors. As an example we created a specific landing page for the DERMS technology, and in the span of 6 months and 15000 website visitors we only had 7 information requests for this specific technology.
Our first approach to this was purely internal. So we rounded up ACS’s leadership, and we set what goals the site should achieve with the revamp. And the main directives out of it were clear, we need more leads, and we need the websites copy to be more clear and concise. Leadership wanted a clean and modern look that conveyed what ACS stood for. And so we started to work on it. We created a new cleaner look, a new architecture for the site.
This was when I started the General Assembly course, and I wanted to use this project as a case study. So the first steps I had to take were to backtrack all the way to the problem statement we had discussed in the first leadership meeting, and schedule interviews with our customers.
We then set out to talk to the users of our systems and to the managers of the control rooms that have our systems installed. We rapidly reached the conclusion that even though the managers were the ones taking the responsibility and signing off on the simple mutation of the system, the user s had veto power over what was good and what was not.
Once we rounded up the answers we got it was clear that the users had three priorities:
- The applications needed to integrate into the existing systems
- The vendor needed to be a trusted brand with utility experience
- The system needed to be cost effective.
So In other words the users want a system with flawless results, but it needs to be on budget and it needs to have the references to have the support of the administration.
So that is how we created the persona, focusing on the system administrator as the primary player.
Mike, Scada Manager
Persona: SCADA manager
Goals:
Crew’s safety is his first priority.
Strives to maintain a reliable power source, as stated in the commitment he pledged to his customers.
Attitudes:
These screens are our eyes and ears on the field, but if something goes wrong there is very little we can do – There is nothing worse than going blind in a crisis.
He knows he is responsible for the team under him even though the operator is actually issuing the controls.
Relationships with vendor are important, the commitment that the solution works and that support is there if needed
Behaviors:
Background in engineering.
Responsible for a team that is, for the most part, older than him.
Conscious that the core of the business is selling energy, and if there is an outage the company is losing.
Even if proud of the operation he is running, he is accepting of change / improvements.
Spends majority of his day:
- Monitoring 5-10 power sources
- Fielding questions from his team, such as…
- Assigning his team to do A, B, C…
- Communicating with customers
So to answer the needs of the users and of the site we decided to start by improving the flow and visibility of the contact request buttons and with that grant better access to the user for educated answers, allowing for clarity and less room for hesitation.
We also made sure we created concise explanation points of the company and application advantages, making sure we’d provide clear explanations of why ACS and its features are an advantage to the users.
And lastly in order to point out the importance given by ACS to the utilities customer and their energy reliability and safety we humanized the way the technology was presented, including the end user on its everyday activities.
These were considered to be the MVP’s and the ones we focused go get this remodel of the website out.
Website user flow
And then we created several rough mock ups of how the website looked like.
Final prototype