PG&E PSPSPublic Safety Power Shutoff
UX/UI design and data engineering for PG&E's Public Safety Power Shutoff applications, serving 5.2 million households across Northern California.
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About the PSPS project
PSPS stands for Public Safety Power Shutoff. Severe weather, such as high winds, can cause trees or debris to damage equipment. If there is dry vegetation, this could lead to a wildfire. That's why PG&E might need to turn power off temporarily to keep everyone safe. This temporary outage is called a Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS). To safely manage the power shutoff with minimum impact, the PSPS division of PG&E relies on tools that serve complex data to chart and pinpoint the exact scope of the power shutoff. PG&E provides natural gas and electricity to 5.2 million households in the northern two-thirds of California, and is one of the largest electric utilities companies in the United States.
Challenges & Issues
The PSPS process for the Tech/Scoping Specialists (users) involve 3 major steps: 1. Scoping, 2. Customer Notifications/Reports and 3. Sharing. The main challenge was to improve the user's flow through each area of the process on three different applications.
Pain Point
Managing tasks across multiple PSPS enterprise tools and Microsoft Office applications
Pain Point
Inconsistent design leading to unstructured information and cluttered interfaces
Pain Point
Overwhelming sensory overload making it difficult to adopt processes
Pain Point
Need for expert guidance to complete tasks efficiently
My Role
As a hands-on contributor, I was responsible for the workload of 3 product teams simultaneously. The development cycle was structured in Agile with standard stand-ups, feature grooming, alignment meetings with business stakeholders, technical analysts and product owners.
User Research & Discovery
Conducted interviews with PSPS Tech and Scoping Specialists to understand existing pain points and gather feedback on new UI designs and prototypes.
Design System Creation
Built comprehensive design systems for both Scoping and Notifications/Reports tools using Atomic Design Framework.
UX Maturity Assessment
Applied NNGroup UX Maturity Model and McKinsey Design Index to measure and improve user-centered design practices.
Implementation & Training
Created training video walkthroughs and documentation for PSPS 2023 required training.
Responsibilities
As a hands-on contributor, I was responsible for the workload of 3 product teams simultaneously. Development was structured in Agile with standard stand-up, user story grooming, with business stakeholders and technical analyst daily alignment meetings.
- Owned all design deliverables, prototypes, UX strategies and methodologies for PSPS product teams
- Daily participation in daily stand-ups
- Created design deliverables and prototypes in Sketch and Figma
- UI design for custom Scoping application using Material UI
- Component and page design in Foundry using Blueprint
- Component design and data visualization in Workshop
- Generated notifications and reports with Contour on large data sets.
- Managed documentation portal in Confluence
- Produced training video walkthroughs for PSPS 2023 required training
- Required compliance training
Methodologies
Discovery
When asked, "How do we improve the user experience on our PSPS products?", I immediately queried how much focused user-centered design was being applied in the product and feature design process. I turned to the NNGroup as reference to the UX Maturity Model to measure the PSPS products' user-centered design practices across teams.
Before gathering the data, I asked the stakeholders involved to share what Stage of the UX Maturity Model they thought their individual product team was currently at. When the actual results were gathered and combined as a whole, it became clear there was a need for more user-centered design practices within the existing processes each product that was evaluated.
Similarly, for Business stakeholders, I applied the McKinsey Design Index that measures how focused design practices affect business success. Using this index, the PSPS products measured low in the 4th quartile with a "33 total MDI score out of 100".
How will we measure UX Maturity?
The UX Maturity Model
UX maturity measures an organization's desire and ability to successfully deliver user-centered design. It encompasses the quality and consistency of research and design processes, resources, tools, and operations, as well as the organization's propensity to support and strengthen UX now and in the future, through its leadership, workforce, and culture.
The McKinsey Design Index (MDI)
The McKinsey Design Index is a formula that measures how good design practices connect to business success. It allows leaders to assess their company's design performance in under an hour, benchmark it with over 300 other companies, and estimate the value-at-stake through improvement.
Stages of UX Maturity
Absent
- • Ignored
- • Nonexistent
- • Undiscovered
Limited
- • Uneven
- • Haphazard
- • Aspirational
Emergent
- • Functional and promising
- • Inconsistent
- • Inefficient
Structured
- • Partly systematic
- • Variably effective
Integrated
- • Comprehensive
- • Pervasive
- • Universal
User-driven
- • Beloved
- • Reproducible
- • Habitual
RESULTS
Limited
Team 1
Limited
Team 2
Emergent
Team 3
MDI
McKinsey Design Index
RESULTS
- PSPS Viewer
- PSIP
- External Portal
Solution
Implemented comprehensive UX improvements including design systems, user research, and process optimization.
Design System Implementation
To aid in Figma prototyping, I set up a design system for the Scoping and Notifications/Reports tools. The Scoping tool is a custom application utilizing the Material UI design system and the Notifications/Reporting tool was the Palantir SaaS application utilizing the Blueprint design system. Both design systems are based on the Atomic Design Framework where its methodology creates interfaces from building blocks to build components and patterns. Part of this task was not only to build and set up reusable components and patterns to improve my workflow, but also to improve visual consistency between the two applications. The Scoping tool layout was reconfigured to match the Notifications/Reporting tool and colors were updated for brand purposes. Business users expressed the need for a dark mode UI option for situation room use during PSPS events so the design system had to support both light and dark mode. With tools and features being added, the design system included visual dashboard components, patterns for system processes and annotations.
Information Design
The interface and navigation was overwhelming so to help reduce the cognitive load, I audited and outlined all content within each page to identify hierarchy as well as relationships between information, functions and navigation flows. I collaborated with Business and Product owners to validate a leaner navigation structure. I was responsible for restructuring and documenting content by transferring knowledge into the Atlassian Confluence portal. There, I was able to use the tree structure helping to easily outline the application content structure and demonstrate UI and other features with screenshots, video walkthroughs and other visual support.
Heuristic Evaluation & UI Improvements
While newer design processes were fully adopted, I still had to work within the same design process helping mock up screens and prototypes for developers. In some tools, content had started to be added endlessly on to their page, so I audited and performed heuristic evaluations on the UI for each product, atomically organizing and sorting content and features. The biggest design challenge I faced was helping transition some Product Owners and Business Analysts from driving and making design decisions. It required more effort to create additional mockups and slides to demonstrate different approaches that would eventually perform better with business users.
User Research & Testing
Conducted extensive user interviews and usability testing with PSPS Scoping Specialists. Gathered qualitative data and organized feedback in Excel to rank issues by priority and severity. I gathered as much qualitative data by conducting general and feature-specific user interviews tailored for each application. To outline and visualize the user journey, I shadowed PSPS Tech Specialists during annual PSPS Full-Scale Event (FSE) exercises that spanned for an entire week and evaluated task-based walkthroughs during moderated usability exercises gathering qualitative feedback along the way.
Mockups & Prototypes
The design process included the creation of visual mockups and interactive prototypes. Mockups were built using the design systems using the UI components to set up the page layout, content and features. For smaller updates and content, mockups could only consist of single static pages. For more complex features, patterns and flow, I built hi-fidelity interactive prototypes that looked and worked just like a real application. To get early feedback from business and technical stakeholders, preview links from Sketch and Figma were linked into comments within the Jira tasks and stories.
Process Improvement & UX Workshops
To start applying more user-centered design practices, I conducted a UX and UI workshop that provided various methods of generating ideas and solutions. I also wanted to create a sense of collaboration that allowed everyone to feel empowered with these practices by developing user empathy. I encouraged collaboration in user-centered design practices for new tools and features by involving stakeholders in planning and work sessions.
Key Learnings
Insights and knowledge gained from this project that shaped my approach to future work.
Power Grid Operations
Learned everything about the electric and natural gas power shutoff process during extreme weather emergencies, including FEMA certification requirements.
Foundry Analytics
Mastered shutoff process reporting and customer data sets using expressions within the Foundry Contour tool, creating reusable templates for team use.
Team Development
Discovered effective ways to set team maturity goals by introducing UX concepts and establishing current maturity levels through objective assessment.
Documentation & Visibility
Learned the importance of maintaining visibility and documentation of work, creating own tasks in Jira and adding them to backlogs for both documentation and visibility.
Project Overview
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