AEP OPERATING COMPANY WEBSITE REDESIGN
American Electric Power (AEP) has 7 Operating Companies (OPCOs). We were tasked with redesigning these existing customer-facing websites in order to align with the company’s new brand refresh and strategy. Since most of our OPCOs provided similar services, we were tasked with designing an overall template that would work for all businesses. Our customers come to our sites to perform key tasks: logging in to their account, paying their bill, reporting an outage or problem, starting/stopping or transferring service and finding payment assistance options. During this 1.5 year project, the team ran multiple usability studies to test various designs to ensure they were efficacious for our customers.
8.24.21 Update: Digital Ease-of-Use score has improved 25.5% since our launch (60.1 in Feb. 2021 to 85.6 in August 2021)
In the first 2 weeks after our launch, our Digital Ease-of-Use score improved by 19.2%.
Our Ease-of-Use Score continues to make improvements: up 18.1 points in our Digital Ease-of-Use scores when compared to the previous site at the same period last year (4/2-4/27).
KEY PROJECT NOTES
Managed a UX Team of 5 (2 UX researchers, 1 QA/UAT, 1 UX Strategist, 1 Sr. UX Designer) through a 1.5 yr timeline for a high-profile project: redesigning all 7 of our customer-facing websites — entirely remote…all during a pandemic
I onboarded 2 new hires (Sr UX Designer and Quality Assurance) to the brand, design, project strategy and team
Presented to key stakeholders and Operating Company senior leadership on design concepts and overall creative direction
Ensuring my team was happy, mentally well, had fun, felt safe to express opinions or concerns, felt valued, and that the team was unified in our approach were some of my top priorities
Our team coordinated with our UX Researchers to plan mobile & desktop usability studies (i.e. A/B tests, click tests, quantitative and qualitative) remotely
We also conducted the largest remote usability study in company history
We used our research findings to guide our end design choices. We continue to monitor our customer feedback and site analytics to quickly pivot to fix any issues.
Our team continuously promoted design thinking, the importance of user experience research and processes within an Agile organization
We coordinated efforts with a 5 person development team for cadence of file hand-off, understanding technological restraints and for establishing design components
Lastly, we established the company’s first-ever Design System (DSM) through InVision
Visit some of our other Operating Companies:
What CUSTOMERS Are Saying
“This website is MUCH MORE USER FRIENDLY than your last one!! I can finally pay online easily! Thanks!”
— PSO CUSTOMER - MARCH 27, 2021
“Excellent new site design. Everything is easy to find. Excellent choice of font and text size.”
— APCO CUSTOMER - MAY 3, 2021
“Easy to use. Quickly re-set password with clear instructions.”
— KENTUCKY POWER CUSTOMER - APRIl 6, 2021
“I can navigate your site and easily find whatever information I need. It’s a very nice and relaxing site to use.”