Everyone’s energy advisor
Energy Saving Trust is on a mission to build a zero carbon society. Working with everyone from individuals to communities, businesses to national governments, it empowers people to make better energy decisions — and ultimately, to help address the climate emergency.
Engaging and sharing information with people online is a key part of Energy Saving Trust’s work, but its website was no longer fit for purpose. We were asked to design and build a new web platform: one that would meet the needs of every visitor, provide an effortless user experience, and bolster our client’s standing as a trusted authority in its sector.
Working alongside our development partner, Clear Honest Design, we designed and delivered a world-class site that’s powered by a deep understanding of the people who use it.
It really felt that HAA were part of our team with their professionalism, expertise and creativity.
Mapping the challenge
Over the course of almost two months of discovery research, we unpicked and explored every element of their website — including a full audit of more than 9000 individual web pages.
This investigation revealed many issues and opportunities for improvement. The site was visually outdated, poorly optimised, and housed many broken links and dead ends. Business and consumer-facing content was split into two separate sites, while confusing user journeys made it hard for visitors to find the information they needed. All of this threatened to undermine our client’s reputation as a reliable source of advice.
We ran a series of collaborative online workshops to get a deeper understanding of the audiences we were designing for.
Our research also dug into the mission and values of Energy Saving Trust itself. This helped us to pinpoint its brand personality, “The Everyday Expert”, which ultimately set the foundations of the new visual identity we created. From an end user perspective, this insight also underlined the importance of making the new site clear, trustworthy and accessible to all.
It was vital that we fully understood the people we were designing for. After conducting a series of workshops, both in person and online, we created six personas that typified our different audience groups. These were developed into empathy maps and user stories that presented a more detailed picture of their goals and needs. From then on, these insights became the focal point for every design decision we made.
Building with principles
Taking what we learned from our research, we created a set of cornerstone principles to steer our approach to information architecture. At the heart of this was a goal common to many of Human After All’s projects: to take something incredibly complex and make it simple.
The new site offers clear, logical paths for navigation, with content arranged around user needs rather than the client’s organisational structure. At every stage of development, we stayed focused on Energy Saving Trust’s audience groups. Whether you’re an energy sector professional, a government policy advisor or a homeowner looking for advice, it’s now swift and straightforward to find the content most relevant to you.
All text and colour combinations on the website were tested to make sure they met Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards.
Transparency and accessibility
When someone visits Energy Saving Trust, they often have two questions on their mind: Who is this organisation, and why should I trust them? These are the same questions we asked ourselves when designing each element of the new site.
In the upper navigation bar, users will find a prominent invitation to explore “Who we are” — offering the chance to learn more about Energy Saving Trust’s work, its leaders, and how the organisation is governed. And for every page of energy-saving advice, there’s an accompanying link that explains why this data can be trusted.
Of course, none of this transparency matters if people can’t access the content. That’s why we worked closely with Clear Honest to ensure that the new site meets the highest accessibility standards, from font legibility and image tags to a high contrast colour palette for users with colour blindness or low contrast sensitivity.
Our approach to UX made sure people could find the content that was most relevant for them.
A foundation for future growth
In refreshing Energy Saving Trust’s branding, we gave the organisation a new visual identity — one that consistently conveys its approachable “Everyday Expert” character. As part of this, we created the Energy Switch: a simple but distinctive device that our client can use to put an ownable stamp on any image.
The new branding was applied to every page we built for the new site, creating unity across Energy Saving Trust’s many departments and initiatives. And because we created these pages using a modular design system, it will be very easy to expand the site in the future. Combined with a user-friendly new CMS, we’ve given Energy Saving Trust a flexible platform to meet its future needs, and support its ambitious mission.
HAA delivered a modern, well-thought out website which is now our foundation for Energy Saving Trust to grow.
A new home for energy advice
Through our robust digital processes and close collaboration with our client, we used reason and empathy to give Energy Saving Trust a web platform built around its audience and their needs.
The new site is a resource that users can trust — in its authority, its transparency, and its practicality — to equip them with the knowledge to make better energy decisions. And because the site is hosted by a provider that uses 100% green-sourced power, it’s also the embodiment of everything Energy Saving Trust stands for.
We’re proud to have partnered with a client whose values are so close to our own.
