Providing people with up-to-date and accurate information about outages is a high priority for Southern California Edison (SCE). To make this experience as easy as possible for people, SCE created an interactive outage map integrating all outage types and warning statuses that previously lived in multiple places. People are now able to find the information they need quickly and in one place.
Here’s some background: as part of the 2021 PSPS Corrective Action Plan (CAP), the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) directed SCE to improve how customers view outages. At the time of this mandate, users were challenged to locate relevant maps since many were dispersed throughout SCE.com. SCE asked us to help integrate their maintenance and repair maps (powered by Google) with their rotating outage and Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) maps for high-fire-risk areas into a single user interface.
Through strategic UX thinking and creative design, we collaborated with SCE’s software development partner to integrate these maps into a consolidated experience. Customers are now able to search by address, outage group number, or meter number to look up data relating to current outages, upcoming scheduled outages, or Public Safety Power Shutoff outages in both list and map views. Additional resources and educational outage information are also easily accessible on the page. Tagging has also been implemented to measure performance. And our work on the consolidated Outage Map earned a Marcom Gold Award.
"A functional consolidated outage map has been a dream of SCE for years. It’s exciting to see it up and running. The map is the product at SCE I am most proud of being able to be a part of bringing to life. It wouldn’t be what it is without all of you!” – Frank Starke, Sr. Digital Product Manager, Customer Experience at Southern California Edison