Local Government

Ausgrid

USER TESTING - EXISTING WEBSITE / EXPERT REVIEW / CRO
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Stage One

Existing website testing

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Stage Two

Design Testing

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Stage Three

Staging Testing

About the Company

Ausgrid is the largest electricity distributor on Australia’s east coast, delivering power to over 1.8 million homes and businesses across Sydney, the Central Coast, and the Hunter Valley.

Rather than selling electricity directly, Ausgrid owns and maintains the network infrastructure—poles, wires, and substations, keeping communities connected.

 

Results

  • Validated core design elements
    Users responded positively to key aspects of the design, confirming the overall direction was effective.
  • Need for clearer communication on timing and urgency
    Users wanted more explicit information on when they would receive updates, how urgency is determined, and realistic ETAs for their reported issue.
  • Gaps in feedback and outcome visibility
    There was uncertainty around what happens after submitting a report, highlighting the need for clearer confirmation and next steps.
  • Mismatch between developer focus and user priorities
    Some design questions and concerns raised internally were not relevant to users in practice.
  • Users prioritise clarity and transparency
    Direct, simple communication and clear outcome-based feedback mattered far more than additional features or complexity.

Objectives

  • Assess whether users can easily navigate the proposed design.
  • Evaluate how well users understand the content.
  • Determine if users can complete key tasks related to reporting issues to Ausgrid.

Discovery and Research

We developed an interactive Figma prototype built from client-provided assets, giving us a realistic and testable representation of the proposed design.

From there, we designed a research program that combined moderated and unmoderated testing sessions.

  • Moderated sessions allowed us to observe users in real time, ask probing questions, and dig deeper into their behaviours and reactions.
  • Unmoderated sessions gave us a broader view of how users naturally interacted with the design without any external guidance.

Together, these approaches gave us a well-rounded picture of the user experience, surfacing both the strengths of the design and the areas most in need of refinement.

 

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Discovery and Research

We developed an interactive Figma prototype built from client-provided assets, giving us a realistic and testable representation of the proposed design.

From there, we designed a research program that combined moderated and unmoderated testing sessions.

  • Moderated sessions allowed us to observe users in real time, ask probing questions, and dig deeper into their behaviours and reactions.
  • Unmoderated sessions gave us a broader view of how users naturally interacted with the design without any external guidance.

Together, these approaches gave us a well-rounded picture of the user experience, surfacing both the strengths of the design and the areas most in need of refinement.

 

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Testing and Analysis

To ensure our findings were relevant and representative, testers were carefully recruited to reflect Ausgrid’s key user personas, giving us confidence that the insights would translate to real-world audiences.

During testing, we went beyond surface-level observations. Targeted follow-up questions allowed us to dig deeper into the issues users encountered, helping us understand not just what was going wrong, but why. This was particularly valuable in uncovering how users were:

  • forming mental models of the system.
  • Revealing gaps between how the design was intended to work.
  • How users actually interpreted and interacted with it.

These insights gave the development team a clear and actionable picture of where the experience needed to be refined, ensuring the final design would feel intuitive and logical to the people using it most

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Findings

Overall, the Figma prototype performed well, with testing surfacing several key areas for improvement:

  • Text and labels: Users sometimes encountered language that felt unclear or awkward, causing confusion at critical points in the journey.
  • Button visibility: On certain screens, the “next” button appeared off-screen, leaving users unsure how to proceed.
  • Map usability: The map functionality presented general usability challenges, with users struggling to interact with it intuitively.
  • Journey clarity over length: Testers showed little concern about the number of steps involved. What mattered far more was the clarity and directness of each individual step.
  • End-of-journey expectations: Users had clear expectations about what should happen after submitting a report — they wanted confirmation of any next steps on their part, and an indication of when they could expect a resolution.
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