PPL Corporation

PPL Corporation (NYSE:PPL) is a leading US energy company focused on providing electricity and natural gas safely, reliably and affordably to more than 3.5 million customers. Their high-performing, award-winning utilities are addressing energy challenges head-on by building smarter, more resilient and more dynamic power grids and advancing sustainable energy solutions.

When it comes to the web, PPL’s trajectory as a very large organization is a familiar but especially inspiring one – just eight short years ago when we first met them, their corporate site wasn’t even operating on a content management system. But since the start of their client partnership with us in 2017, they’ve moved to enterprise WordPress and fully redesigned and rebuilt their corporate site (not once, but twice), in the process becoming one of the most progressive companies in their class.

One of the standout achievements of our redesign work with PPL was the quality of the planning process diligence. As a public company with dozens of executive and departmental stakeholders across the organization, it was both important and challenging to create strong alignment at the start of our project.

Here at PM, our design roadmaps are strategic, living artifacts that set the direction for our web design team’s professional work. They’re meant to act as a single source of truth to help the joint client / PM team align around the strategic vision, user experience, task completion and service goals, and visual creative styles that drive the design of the new site.

So we engaged stakeholders from across PPL in a series of collaborative workshops, to obtain direct input on the site’s future design and functionality. By effectively engaging all the key players, we were able to create a shared mental model of the desired outcomes and an environment in which anyone across the organization would be able to glance at the roadmap and clearly understand how we’d be getting from A to B.  

“Design roadmaps are meant to set direction, and later act as an accountability tool the joint client/agency team can use to evaluate the results achieved by the project.”

A key opportunity we identified during the roadmap process was the opportunity to better serve PPL’s Investor Relations audiences (mainly industry analysts and institutional investors). We requested and were actually granted permission to talk with a number of these external parties. In doing so we identified a strong interest on their part in being able to find all of the company’s filings, reports, and earnings data in a single place.

Their input was invaluable, and gave us a clear path to restructuring not just the Investor Relation overview page of the site, but every page of the entire section. PPL’s investors are in a much better position to quickly find and start using the extensive financial data the company makes publicly available – as one of the institutional investors we talked with called it, a “grab-and-go” approach.

The workflows we designed to support this in WordPress are intuitive, streamlined, and easy to use for the company’s admin users. And we produced a comprehensive UX/UI Kit for PPL’s investor and media relations partner, CISION, to ensure a seamless, consistent visual and functional experience across platforms.