Sector(s)
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is the largest municipal utility in the United States, serving millions of residents and businesses in Los Angeles. With a history spanning over a century, LADWP provides essential water and power services to one of the most diverse and populous regions in the country. In order to improve the citizen experience, Hounder conducted surveys and performed both qualitative and quantitative design research to effectively design and build a self-service website that all Los Angeles residents could use quickly and easily on any device. With over 1 million users a day, we knew this website design had to be empathetic and customer-obsessed to be successful.
About the project
The primary goal was to redesign the LADWP website into a modern, self-service Drupal platform that simplifies access to essential resources for Los Angeles residents. Specifically, the redesign sought to:
- Improve user accessibility: Reduce the number of clicks needed to access key services.
- Enhance responsiveness and accessibility: Ensure optimal performance across all devices and compliance with ADA standards.
- Foster long-term sustainability: Build a future-proof design that minimizes the need for frequent updates.
Hounder conducted a discovery workshop to identify the website’s crucial user needs. Research revealed five primary goals users had when visiting the LADWP website:
- Pay my bills
- Get information on outages in my area
- Financial Assistance / Savings Programs
- Start or Stop service
- Water and Power Information for Construction
We moved forward with a content audit so that the team could figure out the best way to organize information more intuitively. The resulting journey maps outlined how users interact with the site and identified opportunities to streamline access to key services.
The design process began with grayscale wireframes to establish the building blocks for all components, layouts, and content types. This rapid prototyping phase helped identify weak points and optimize them early. Once the wireframes were validated, Hounder moved on to full-color user interface (UI) designs, creating a modern, cohesive visual identity.
The redesigned LADWP website now offers an intuitive, streamlined experience that empowers users to complete tasks efficiently. This helped this utility organization achieve:
- 80% faster login and bill payment processes.
- 100% success rate in users finding necessary information.
Why Drupal was chosen
The new LADWP website uses 33 unique templates and over 40 robust components with more than 400 variations, allowing for flexible and scalable content management within the Drupal platform. Drupal’s modular architecture allowed us to build these custom components efficiently while ensuring seamless integration with LADWP’s backend systems.
We were able to leverage Drupal’s robust capabilities to transform the user experience while addressing complex technical requirements.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
