Arizona Public Services | Bill Redesign

Background

Arizona Public Services, a gas and electricity utilities company that services over 1.5 million people, was looking to improve their electronic and paper bill designs so that their various customer types gain confidence in their billing data and APS as a company.

Challenge

Design a better way for Arizona Public Services (APS) customers to utilize and comprehend their bill so that they are enabled to confidently make payments, manage costs, and help drive improved future behavior in their usage.

Approach

Redesign the electricity bills their various types of consumer and business customers receive every month through the lens of strategized research with APS customers and industry analysis as well as service design at the forefront.

My role(s)

I was the UX and service design lead who guided our approach to research, UX design, visual design, and internal and external communications and presentations. I was also the Enterprise Design Thinking Lead that created, structured and led two workshops and two co-creation sessions while educating our clients through our user-focused methodology so they were aligned at every step, while being integrated with our team.

Absorbing the current state

Arizona Public Services had previously tried to redesign their utility bills but received critical feedback from their customers because it did not match their needs or address issues that they had with understanding their billing data or paying their bills, which made them revert to their old design. APS needed a research-led approach encapsulating their users’ inputs at every step of the bill redesign process, which is where our team came in.

Auditing the current bill

One of our first activities to understand the current state was an extensive content audit documenting all modules, visuals, and text within the nine different bill types associated with customers including solar, value, and regular customer bills. This helped us break down the current bill into categorical facets that we can prioritize consolidating, augmenting, or removing based on the needs that we derive from user research.

Getting to know our customers

To ensure we were accounting for all customer types represented in our five personas, we had a number of methods for generative research including one on one interviews sessions with customers and stakeholders and group Customer Advisory Board sessions (designated APS customers who actively participate in providing feedback) that helped us build a foundation of understanding our customers’ needs and pains to better expand upon and define our personas, which in turn provides north stars for problem solving.

12

Residential Customer Interviews

5

Commercial Customer Interviews

8

External Stakeholder Interviews

4

Customer Advisory Board Group Interview Sessions

Surveying the industry

We executed an in-depth industry analysis across over 100 different utility bills and companies to understand best practices and benchmarking through the lens of our UX pillars. These pillars are used as a north star in creating an optimal design and experience. We used these six pillars to align to each industry billing experience.

71

Physical Bills

Paper bills sent to customers from utility companies located across the United States including SRP, Dominion Power, Xcel Energy, BGE and ConEd

35

Digital Bills

Bills or bill paying platforms that are viewed and experienced through digital formats Online Portal, Mobile, and Email

8

PDF Downloadable Bills

PDF bills that customers can view and download to review in depth at a later time or keep for their records

Team workshops form big ideas

Now that we had focused understandings of the hurdles our customers were facing and their needs for the future, we needed to get those data points in front of a large group to form ideas around them. Using the Enterprise Design Thinking framework, a team comprised of IBM, APS, External Stakeholders, and APS Customers worked to understand the user needs and pain points to then identify and prioritize big ideas and create future state stories. Another large accomplishment was the building of EDT advocacy within APS stakeholders that were unfamiliar with our ways of working. We had folks who were at one point skeptical about a new way of working and transformed their perspective, which they then advocated to others about.

The proof is in the collaboration

Our workshop outcomes in combination with our previously completed research provided a strong platform for our first steps in designing the future state APS bill experience for their varied customer base. We created, gathered, and prioritized team-aligned ideas that came from gaining an understanding of opportunities found in the current state and building those opportunities into user-based needs for the ideal future state. These needs translated to big ideas created by our workshop groups that would fundamentally transform the bill experience. Along with our big ideas, we created capabilities that were integral in understanding necessary aspects of our designs as well as provide APS with a roadmap for future possible work.

50+

Big Ideas Thought Through

Rapidly diverged on a breadth of possible solutions to meet our customers’ needs

16

Future State Storyboards Created

Communicated our big ideas through visual stories that showcased how they fit into our customers’ lives

60+

Needs Statements Written

Outlined what our customers need in order to achieve their goals

All workshops at a glance

In addition to our initial workshop shown above, I created and led three other sessions that allowed us to solve specific problems through a team-perspective that enabled us to progress with alignment among all of the involved teams, stakeholders, and of course APS customers on pertinent decisions.

Understand & Ideate

Using the Enterprise Design Thinking framework, the team worked to understand the user needs and pain points and then identify and prioritize big ideas to create future state stories.

Relate & Prioritize

Teams applied knowledge of previous user research to prioritize key JD Power Associates categories and utilize those categories along with prior research and outcomes, to build and prioritize template iterations of future state bills.

Validate & Iterate

Customers applied knowledge of previous user research provided and their own knowledge to validate and improve upon the current iterations of future state APS bill designs through structured questions and discussion.

Final Validation

Customers applied knowledge of previous user research provided and their own knowledge to validate near-final iterations of future state APS bill designs through structured questions and discussion.

Bridging our users’ needs with our design decisions

Since the client had previously attempted and failed to redesign their bill, building trust was essential. We needed to show that our research and methods were guiding the project in the right direction. That meant clearly explaining the reasoning behind each decision we made from wireframes through visual design. Our team understood that every step we took was foundational for the next, and this became an opportunity to build trust through transparency. We were always cognizant to highlight how user insights from our various types of sessions directly influenced key design decisions in shaping new components and their hierarchy of the future bill design.

Team retrospectives

Every other week, I ran team retros to make sure everyone felt comfortable speaking up—even with big personalities in the room. It was a chance for us to talk honestly about how we’re working together, what’s going well, and where we could improve. We also gave each other shout-outs to keep things positive and show appreciation. This sparked open conversations, boosted morale, and encouraged quieter team members to speak up. It carried over into stand-ups and other meetings, making our discussions more balanced and collaborative.

Our continuous feedback loop

Although we gained so much insightful information from our initial generative research with commercial and residential customers, as well as from our stakeholders, the success and value of our created framework throughout the project was being iterative. That meant continually putting our updated designs in front of stakeholders and users alike to keep us grounded and learn what should be changed based on predominance of feedback. We did this in multiple ways including an interactive survey sent to over 1000 Arizona Public Service customers that told us what aspects of our new designs resonated most with customers, how aspects these designs compared to the current APS bill designs and industry standards, and how well participants understood data visualizations. This all greatly informed hierarchy, needed changes, and validation.

The best part is we quantified feedback through this survey as well as a feedback tracker so that the changes we did make were impactful based on majority feedback and not on a few outliers alone. As mentioned earlier, this type of data was crucial in explaining our decision-making of why we did and didn’t make design changes to our stakeholders.

40+

Bill variations created based on found user and business needs across seven customer types

150+

Dynamic components created that change based on customers and their billing situations

2100+

Customers engaged through quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews, workshops, and customer advisory board sessions

Enterprise Design Thinking Coach Badge

My ongoing goal is to learn from and teach others to gain a deeper, more empathetic understanding of those around me. In my career, I aim to expand this by connecting with more people, encouraging them in ways that feel natural to them. This happens through mentoring, team collaboration, and developing flexible problem-solving approaches tailored to each unique context. Becoming an Enterprise Design Thinking Coach would help define and further this journey. Using this project as a case study, I applied for the EDT Coach Badge, which requires a formal application to a committee of judges of a case study embodying how I have structured, facilitated, and taught the Enterprise Design Thinking framework in a project(s) setting. Needless to say, I was accepted. Not only that, but my entry was deemed “Hall of Fame” worthy. By association I think that makes me a Hall of Famer?