ESB Networks Website & PowerCheck

ESB Networks supplies electricity to 2.3 million homes and businesses across Ireland. As custodians of the nation’s clean energy future, they ensure the national electricity network operates safely and efficiently. This is achieved through continuous investment in networks, services, technologies and customer touchpoints. WONDR designed a new website and PowerCheck application to allow electricity customers to check if there’s a power outage and report a fault, being an asset during storm season. The redesign allowed modernised ESB Networks’ digital presence to fully express their customer-first ethos. The product team felt that the experience didn’t answer their customer or stakeholder needs. It was difficult to navigate and looked outdated.The website needed to be easy to navigate and have a quick customer usage route. As a service website, the less time they spend on the site, the greater the success. We restructured the Information Architecture to reflect the real needs of the user, making an elastic search as prominent as possible. The updated UX and UI design is intuitive, using content chunking methods to bring users along a journey and making the vast amount of information easily digestible. Accessibility is a big feature of this product, as it’s a semi-state body it requires the highest level of compliance for accessibility so all users can comfortably use the site. One clear challenge was how best to adapt the website during power outages, recognising that 70% of customers visit the sites on mobile devices, by implementing a forward-thinking ‘mobile-first’ mindset we helped users get to the information they needed quickly. Every adult in Ireland will check the ESB website at some point in their lives, so the website calls to be fully accessible and WC3 compliant to cater to every ability. The final design and development outputs were modular and simple; it provides a solution that the business can flex as the need arises, with the confidence that accessibility and style consistency are ‘baked into’ the platform design. There are already optimisations in the works, as well as new digital projects that will further enhance the customer experience on ESB Networks.