Through collaboration and pooling of resources, the Pacific Northwest's more than 140 utilities and stakeholders partnered with Rockit Science to create a new interactive website experience. NEEA, via their new website, harnessed their collective influence to drive market adoption of energy efficiency products, services, and practices for the benefit of utilities, consumers and the region.
The Challenge
Keeping utilities and regional stakeholders informed on the alliance's activities, emerging technologies, industry best practices, and advancements within the energy industry is a full-time job. Navigating the priorities of each group takes a complete understanding of audience segmentation in order to successfully implement solutions that fulfill not only their missions but also achieve consumer education and market awareness. Our challenge as communicators is to simplify highly complex stakeholder practices designed to meet a wide variety of utility needs and to drive engagement and participation in utility-led conservation programs. The aim of our efforts is to help utilities substantially increase the number of customers who will take additional energy efficiency action across the region.
The Approach
Our interactive approach started with an in-depth Research and Discovery phase allowing us to hear first hand the needs of various utility marketing teams and NEEA board members all working towards the same goal. This process takes a deep dive into the proposed interactive tools, plugins, and framework inputs all while examining initial thoughts around user site personas and usage, as well as forming the foundation for the entire UI/UX process. At varying stages of the site build, we employed various User Acceptance Testing (UAT) touch points in order to receive feedback from our anticipated user audiences. This approach closed the gap between what we as designers and developers anticipate by letting the actual end user define our success.
The energy model for the rest of the country
Developing a visual language requires various sets of dynamic content and data displays to ensure ease-of-use through search, data visualization, sharing, and adoption. Positioning NEEA at the forefront of energy efficiency for the country meant housing mass amounts of reports, studies, models, and success stories that could be easily displayed, located and, shared.
A seamless experience
Responsive layouts with flexible grids allowed the flow of content across a variety of screen sizes, constraints, and capabilities—making sure the experience works great across desktops, mobile devices, tablets and is successful in preparing it for new devices in the future.
Mapping opportunities to advance emerging technologies
In the Northwest, efficiency organizations, utilities, laboratories, and others are working together and pooling their resources to identify and refine technologies that perform well and save energy for Northwest consumers, while decreasing risks for the region. Rockit Science built a custom, interactive platform that offered a full picture of the alliance’s emerging technology activities across the region. Various API integrations across several 3rd party platforms were written to ensure data points could be updated through a centralized database and pushed out to various channels.
- Coming Soon
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