WORK: Heuristic Evaluation
Heuristic Evaluation: Energy Utilities
BACKGROUND
An energy utility company providing natural gas and electric service to its customers in San Antonio, CPS Energy was looking to upgrade their version of Adobe Experience Manager and redesign both their website and intranet on that platform. We wanted to conduct a preliminary evaluation of their website before moving on to further, more extensive research.
As an expert in user experience design practices, I performed a heuristic evaluation, analyzing CPS Energy's publicly-available webpages and comparing them to the websites of Georgia Power, Salt River Project, and OGE Energy Corp. A heuristic evaluation is a method of evaluating both digital and physical products and services in order to identify key issues based on a set of usability, design, and business principles. The principles we use evolved from the Heuristic Evaluation methodology introduced in 1990 by Jakob Nielsen, other industry leaders, and our own expertise.
I conducted the review alongside Hanya Moharram, Design Researcher at Capgemini Invent. We each independently evaluated the interface and then aggregated our findings.
“[A heuristic] evaluation facilitates catching oversights before they become truly problematic.”
OBJECTIVES
Evaluate CPS Energy’s website against a series of usability heuristics and design guidelines
Uncover possible opportunities for further research
Compare the website to other leading companies in the energy utility space
The home page of the CPSenergy.com website - the focus of our heuristic evaluation.
METHODS
In order to evaluate each company, we scored each website using the following heuristics. Each heuristic has a subset of heuristics, which we scored on a scale of 1-3, with 1 being “best practice” and 3 being “significant/critical issue”.
After scoring each subset of heuristics, we calculated an “experience score” to allow us to compare designs across a set of 3 competitors.
Interaction and Functionality
Does the website follow the target user’s mental models and expectations and does all functionality work appropriately?
Error Prevention & Recovery
Does the website provide guidance and feedback to help prevent errors, and instruction on how to resolve them when they occur?
User Control & Flexibility
Does the system grant users the ability to make their own decisions and have control over the outcomes in the system?
Help & Documentation
When all else fails, is it easy to find instruction on what to do?
Accessibility & Input
Are appropriate redundancies in place to help all users?
Value Proposition
Does the software offer a clear and differentiated value that is actionable by users?
Consistency & Standards
Do content, aesthetics, layout, interaction, and objects remain consistent throughout the website?
Visibility of System Status
Is the user always kept informed of what's going on through appropriate feedback and status change?
Aesthetic & Visual Design
Does the overall visual appearance and aesthetic treatment of content convey meaning and a modern, professional experience?
Content Clarity & Scannability
Is the content easy to read and understandable?
The 3 energy utility company websites we reviewed, in addition to our main client.
FINDINGS
Overall, we found CPS Energy’s experience score to be significantly lower than its competitors.
The main areas of opportunity (< 2 in our scale) include:
Value proposition — the main “calls to action” on CPS’s site are difficult to find, making it hard for the user to understand where to look first
Visibility of system status — the navigation of CPS’s site does not show any state changes as a user moves through the site, so it is difficult for a user to know their current location within the site
Interaction & functionality — the links on CPS’s site are inconsistent in their appearance (some are underlined, some are bolded, some are both) and open to an external page (vs internal/same page) seemingly at random, which causes confusion for the user
User control & flexibility — clickable images are not clearly marked and state changes are inconsistent for buttons across the site
Accessibility & input — the buttons on the site lack sufficient contrast for readability (white text on orange background), and a majority of the images do not contain alternative text
Our heuristic evaluation “scorecard” for CPS Energy, divided by heuristic and rated according to level of severity (click to enlarge).
Comparing experience scores across all 4 sites.
NEXT STEPS
Based on our heuristic evaluation, there is tremendous opportunity for research across multiple categories on the CPSenergy.com site.
Some of the major opportunities for next steps include:
Conduct contextual inquiries — perform research to understand why users come to the site and what are their most important needs
Information architecture studies — optimize structure of site according to user’s mental models
Accessibility audit — ensure CPSenergy.com meets both accessibility and readability standards
Usability testing — assess inconsistencies in site patterns and understand user expectations and mental models; also focus on navigability of website and user’s ability to complete the most important tasks
Redesign user interface — update user interface (UI) design based on industry best practices and insights from user research
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