My agency Lushai has provided research and usability testing services to Contact Energy for many years, in one of our favourite projects Contact Emery needed help identifying the different behaviours people exhibited when choosing plans and strategies for how to structure and present those plans to accommodate those behaviours.

I combined contextual interviews with prototype testing, comparing people’s past experiences choosing plans for different types of utilities (power, phone, internet, etc) with their reactions to prototypes of different designs for presenting plans being considered by Contact.
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Along with my colleague Akriti Rana I looked for the processes people used when deciding which plan to select, looking for why some people did extensive research and why some did none. We discovered some large differences in behaviour when selecting a plan for power compared to selecting a plan for other utilities. This gave us important insights into how power plans needed to be presented for different segments of the public.

After comparing our data points of power plan selection, other utility selection, and insights gathered from early prototype testing, we were able to create a matrix that advises how to present the plans to each group. We were able to advise how to balance the competing needs of some segments and recommend a process for refining and testing the different options being considered for website-based plan selection.