The State Government corporation has an important role to play, so digital services are vital to help drive certainty and efficiency.
Western Power engaged Equilibrium to build their website from the ground up, transforming the way the utility interacts with its customers. Equilibrium is also a key partner on Western Power’s digital services panel, helping to achieve their communication objectives.
The Western Power website is accessed on a daily basis by a diverse user base ranging from Mum and Dad at home through to small businesses and big industry. Our task was to build a website where it is possible to empower residential and business customers to intuitively “self-serve”
Western Power’s customers include the entire Perth and South West adult population, as well as all businesses in this region. Important users of the site include land developers, local councils, and electrical contractors. Extensive scoping was undertaken with the virtually all areas of Western Power’s business to formulate an initial strategy.
Given the complex nature of Western Powers operations, we undertook extensive stakeholder engagement. We facilitated communication between departments and ensured the project was kept on track.
We developed interactive prototypes to test the strategy on real user groups, ensuring an optimal user experience was developed from the very outset.
We developed an important tool to allow users to report damaged or faulty streetlights. Users can access an interactive map which shows every streetlight on every street in Perth. Users can click on a streetlight to report it as faulty and can also see known faulty streetlights on the map.
Executive Manager, Customer and Corporate Services of Western Power Simon WalshOur team has worked closely with Equilibrium to deliver a website that benefits all of our customers.
Extensive security and load balance testing
The website on average receives hundreds of concurrent users. However, in a power outage situation the website can receive thousands of hits in a short space of time, Therefore, Equilibrium setup a sophisticated load balanced environment to ensure quick load times and stability during peak periods.
This was recently tested in a real world large scale power outage situation with the site being hit with thousands of concurrent users within a space of 3 minutes. The peak in traffic was sustained over a period of 30 minutes, but the load balancing environment worked as intended and handled the traffic with ease.
