BC Hydro

End Client: BC Hydro
Collaborated with: Direct connection
Service Area: User Centred Design
Services Provided: Senior User Experience (UX) Advisor
Vertical: Public Utility Company

Overview
BC Hydro and Power Authority is a Canadian electric utility in the province of British Columbia generally known simply as BC Hydro. It is the main electric distributor, serving 1.8 million customers in most areas,[1] with the exception of the Kootenay region, where FortisBC, a subsidiary of Fortis Inc. directly provides electric service to 213,000 customers and supplies municipally owned utilities in the same area.

Challenge
BC Hydro was already well into a project to rollout an SAP HR implementation that was slated to be virtually OOTB (Out of The Box). Historically SAP systems have been very powerful in terms of functionality, but very poor in terms of the user experience (UX) so needless to say there was much to be done. Some aspects of the system were to be internal facing and some were to be external facing, and although the internal facing aspects needed to be improved upon, the external aspects needed a great deal of rework in order make them ready for BC Hydro’s valuable potential employees.

Solution
With very little range of project scope to create positive change, for the internal OOTB SAP interface the first order of business was to address the low hanging fruit. Beginning with:

• Creating consistency in labelling across multiple projects/systems sharing the same UI
• Adding embedded user assistance
• Removing redundant and confusing interface controls
• Replacing generic (again, out of the box) graphical elements with BC Hydro brand elements — We are strong believers in utilizing branding for internal systems as well. That way employees become stronger brand ambassadors.

The external facing components needed to function as part of BC Hydro’s recruitment efforts, which required extra effort to bring them in line with corporate brand, and established UX guidelines. Unfortunately, an additional project phase would be necessary to bring about all the changes Fluid Perception recommended due to scope limitations in phase 1. The recommendations were based on:

• A heuristic analysis of the OOTB user interface
• A competitive analysis to baseline industry best practice
• Wireframes that demonstrated a revised screen design and user flow

The screens below represent a sample of some of the deliverables.