Usability Connects a Community with Its Public Utility
About
Tacoma Public Utilities (TPU) provides services that are vital to Tacoma citizens’ quality of life: Power, Water, Rail, and Click! Cable TV. Publicly owned since 1893, TPU is the largest department in Tacoma City government.
Problem Overview
TPU’s website was outdated. It needed a responsive website organized in a way that anticipates the needs of its customers to help them quickly find the information they are looking for.
Starting with Research
Our user experience team collaborated with the TPU team for goal setting, tree testing and card sorting activities. The results informed wireframes, prototypes and helped establish a new information architecture for the website. We also met with key stakeholders across the organization to identify their goals for the project. We learned that the website had a high bounce rate because the customers could not quickly find what they were looking for — answers to questions and contact information.
Improved Information Architecture
Prior to the redesign, each of TPU’s services were housed in three sections of the main website: Power, Water, and Rail. Three separate sections made for a lot of duplicate content. Research uncovered valuable insights about user search: people were searching for topics, rather than by department. User behavior informed new navigation to help users to find resources by topics such as Outages & Safety and Ways to Save.
Custom Training Sessions
Each department in TPU updates their own sections of the website. Prior to launch, we provided multiple training sessions that were customized for each department and focused on how to edit and manage content in each area. We also provided full training for the TPU marketing team.
Contributors
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