PSEG is a major electric and gas utility provider serving millions of customers across New Jersey and Long Island. This engagement focused on modernizing PSEG’s public website and customer portal to improve self-service adoption, usability, and customer satisfaction across digital channels.
Clients
Public Service Electric and Gas Company (PSEG)
Service
Product Innovation
Industry
Utilities & Energy
Year
2016
Modernizing the PSEG Customer Portal Experience
The initiative aimed to reimagine PSEG’s digital experience to support high-frequency customer tasks such as billing, payments, usage tracking, and service requests. The goal was to reduce dependency on call centers while improving clarity, efficiency, and cross-device usability.
The current scenario
Usability evaluations revealed that the existing PSEG website and customer portal suffered from inconsistent navigation, poor responsiveness, and weak visual hierarchy. Key actions such as login, bill payment, outage reporting, and alerts were difficult to discover and inefficient to complete—especially on mobile devices.Customers frequently relied on call centers to resolve issues that could have been handled through self-service, increasing operational costs and customer frustration.
Explore the PSEG Portal
View the customer portal experience showcasing redesigned self-service flows, billing interactions, and responsive layouts.
Need for a Usable, Self-Service–First Digital Experience
- Core customer actions were hard to find and inconsistently prioritized
- Navigation and interaction patterns varied across pages and devices
- Mobile users experienced significant usability breakdowns
- Poor discoverability increased call center dependency
Benefits of a Reimagined Customer Portal
- Faster access to billing, payments, and usage information
- Reduced friction in high-frequency customer journeys
- Improved mobile usability across devices
- Lower operational load on support centers
Design-Led Evaluation and Optimization
The engagement followed a structured UX process combining heuristic evaluation, competitive benchmarking, and user behavior analysis. Industry usability principles were applied to identify high-severity issues across homepage navigation, post-login dashboards, and transactional flows.
Insights from analytics, user segmentation, and real-world scenarios informed design decisions aimed at aligning the experience with customer expectations and natural usage patterns.
Research & Design Phases
Research Findings
Heuristic analysis uncovered major usability violations related to consistency, feedback, responsiveness, and task prioritization across key journeys.
Understanding the Users and Their Needs
User research identified multiple customer segments with distinct behaviors, including cost-focused households, energy-conscious users, and digitally disengaged customers—each requiring clarity and ease of use.
Ideation
Design concepts focused on reprioritizing high-value actions, simplifying navigation models, and improving system feedback during critical tasks.
Design & Prototyping
Responsive wireframes and visual designs were created for key flows such as login, dashboard, billing, payments, and alerts across desktop, tablet, and mobile breakpoints.
Validation
Iterative testing and refinement ensured improved clarity, reduced cognitive load, and predictable system behavior across scenarios.
Following the research and design phases, the proposed experience was evaluated by mapping common customer scenarios—such as high-bill concerns, payment workflows, and outage reporting—against the redesigned portal.
The redesigned journeys emphasized proactive guidance, clearer system feedback, and contextual assistance. Customers could understand issues, explore options, and complete tasks without switching channels or escalating to support.
The evaluation demonstrated that aligning design decisions with real customer behavior significantly improved usability, confidence, and self-service effectiveness across the platform.
The Impact
Increased self-service adoption
Customers could complete common tasks independently with fewer errors and less effort.
Reduced support dependency
Clearer journeys and feedback lowered call center volume for routine issues.
Improved cross-device usability
Responsive designs ensured consistent experiences across desktop, tablet, and mobile.
MAKE