We prototyped improvements that promote conservation to the Seattle City Light electricity bill and the Seattle Public Utilities water bill. We believe that by making it easy to compare your usage to the Seattle average, we can tap into people's competitive desire to do better. Making the bills easier to read helps raise people's awareness of how they're using resources. We can also promote conservation by adding some of the energy saving tips from the Seattle City Light website directly to the bill. View the bills.
Seattle City Light Bill
Seattle Public Utilities Bill
Design Notes
We did not remove any information from the bills, we just redesigned the existing information. If we were doing a blue sky redesign, we would recommend showing less data to the customer (e.g. simplify billing details and notices). This would make the bill easier to read and would highlight the parts of the bill related to conservation.
We prototyped three levels of improvements to the bills.
Level I Design
Comparison: A simple text box makes it easy to compare your usage to the Seattle average. We believe comparison taps into people's competitive desire to do better. Comparison may also help people recognize abnormal usage due to water leaks or energy efficiency problems.
Level II Design
Comparison + Improved Graphs: In addition to the Level I improvements, we redesigned the Compare Your Usage section by providing more historical data and showing how your usage compares to the average. We improved the layout of the bill and removed industry specific terms such as CCF (100 cubic feet of water or 748 gallons).
Level III Design
Comparison + Improved Graphs + Conservation Tips: In addition to the Level I and Level II improvements, we added two conservation tips to the bill and a pointer to 30 Simple Energy Things You Can Do to Save the Earth on the Seattle Public Utilities website. We also labeled the sections of the bill, arranged them in priority order, and unified the design of the Seattle Public Utilities bill and the Seattle City Light bill.
Why did we do this? To help continue Seattle's tradition of environmental leadership!