WEB DEVELOPMENT
Fewer Steps, Faster Help:
Designing a Saved Locations for a Utility Outage Portal
ROLE
Lead Designer
DURATION
1 year
TEAM
1 Designer
6 Engineers
TECHNOLOGY
Material UI
React Web
OVERVIEW
The Problem
When every second counts during a power outage, repetitive form entry is more than an inconvenience, it's a friction point that slows users down when they need help most.
While supporting the development of a utility company's outage portal, our team identified an opportunity to reduce that friction through anonymous saved locations. By allowing users to store frequently used addresses without requiring an account, we eliminated a repetitive step across the portal's core transactions: reporting an outage and checking outage status.
PLANNING
Integrating a New Feature Into an Existing Experience
Because the outage portal was already fully developed, and every transaction within it anchored to an address, introducing a new feature required more than just designing new screens.
Before a single component was created, it was essential to step back and map out every point in the existing flow where saved locations would need to live, ensuring the feature felt native to the experience rather than bolted on.
DESIGN
Designed for Every Entry Point
Outages was designed mobile-first, meeting users where they're most likely to need it: on their phones in the middle of an outage.
The feature was integrated across three key touchpoints in the portal: the global navigation for quick access at any time, the outage reporting flow to streamline the most critical transaction, and the outage map for faster status lookups. No matter where a user entered the experience, saved locations was there to reduce friction and save time.
Reflections
This project was a quiet but meaningful reminder of the value of systems thinking in design. It's easy to approach a new feature as its own isolated problem, to jump straight into screens and interactions without first asking how it fits into the larger whole. But when you're designing within an existing system, that instinct has to be resisted. Every decision ripples outward, and the quality of the final experience depends on how well you understand the ecosystem you're designing into before you start.
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Stepping back to map the full flow before any design work began wasn't a delay — it was the work. It's what allowed the feature to feel like it had always belonged there.