Billing Simplified

Context

The utility bill reaches over 10 million residential and institutional customers across five regulated regions, each with its own rate structures, legal rules, and disclosure requirements.

Historically, the bill was one of the most complex in the industry—long, dense, inconsistent, and overloaded with compliance-driven language. Over time, well-intentioned attempts to “make it clearer” only added more content, making it harder for customers to understand what they owed, when, and why.

Our goal was to transform this historically confusing experience into a clear, accessible, adaptive billing system—one that maintains a consistent structure while flexing to the needs of each jurisdiction. This redesign had to meet full ADA/WCAG AA compliance, improve comprehension, and reduce call center volume for one of the country’s largest utilities.

Key challenges:

• Five regulated regions with unique rules, disclosures, and rate structures

• ADA/WCAG AA compliance required across all formats

• Heavy legal constraints restricting terminology and placement of required elements

• A 2M+ customer base with diverse reading levels and accessibility needs

• Confusion driving high call center volume and low customer satisfaction

Problem

Opening the legacy bill was overwhelming for customers. From dense copy blocks to complex graphs, the bill offered no clear “at-a-glance” view of charges.

Customers couldn’t easily determine what they owed, why, or how totals were calculated. Many also struggled to understand third-party supplier information, misinterpreting supply versus delivery charges, or not realizing they were enrolled at all.

The problem was compounded by fragmented layouts across regions, inconsistent legal interpretations, and a complete lack of accessibility. Typography, contrast, and reading order didn’t meet ADA standards, forcing a close partnership with the ADA team to validate every element. The bill was confusing, inaccessible, and frustrating—reinforcing the need for a comprehensive redesign.

Key pain points:

• Buried key information: total charges, usage, and due dates were hard to find

• Overloaded copy and dense graphs increased cognitive load

• Confusion about third-party suppliers

• Fragmented structure across five jurisdictions

• Non-compliant accessibility standards

My Role

As Design Lead, reporting to the Principal Experience Designer, I led the end-to-end strategy and execution for this multi-jurisdiction, ADA-compliant billing system.

I was responsible not only for shaping the design vision but also for orchestrating collaboration across legal, regulatory, engineering, ADA, and content teams.

Responsibilities included:

• Defining the design vision, modular system architecture, and adaptive templates

• Leading and mentoring a team of three designers to ensure craft quality, consistency, and alignment

• Partnering with product, legal, engineering, and regulatory stakeholders daily

• Facilitating workshops to resolve legal and technical tradeoffs

• Validating designs through usability testing, surveys, and expert reviews

• Ensuring full ADA/WCAG AA compliance across print and digital formats

Team collaboration:

Content Designer:

• Translated dense regulatory language into plain-language messaging

• Established content hierarchy rules aligned with modular design system

• Reviewed each section for comprehension, readability, and accessibility

UI/UX Designers:

• Scaled components and templates across all regions

• Refined patterns, spacing logic, and accessibility rules

• Parallelized workflows to accelerate iteration and maintain a unified design language

Research & Insights

Our discovery phase combined SME interviews, comparative analysis, and customer testing. A few themes emerged clearly:

Customer insights:

• Difficulty locating total amount due and understanding usage vs. charges

• Dense text and charts caused cognitive overload

• Confusion around third-party suppliers

• Regional terminology inconsistencies

Business & operational insights:

• Complexity drove unnecessary call center volume

• Regional interpretations of legal requirements caused layout inconsistencies

• Back-office workflows were error-prone

These findings shaped a strategy focused on clarity, hierarchy, and scalable modularity.

Design Strategy

The redesign required a solution that was flexible, legally defensible, and consistent across five jurisdictions.

Adaptive, Modular System:

I architected a jurisdiction-aware system that maintained a universal structure while allowing each region to plug in required disclosures, rate rules, and content.

Design principles:

• Modular blocks with consistent spacing, labeling, and ordering

• Adaptive templates accommodating regional rules

• Clear visual hierarchy supporting quick scanning

• Plain-language microcopy aligned with legal teams

• WCAG AA–compliant typography, contrast, and color

Information Architecture:

• Consolidated redundant sections

• Simplified ordering

• Prioritized the “Big 3”: Amount Due → Due Date → How It’s Calculated

• Reduced cognitive load with summaries, charts, and grouped line items

Cross-Functional Collaboration

This project succeeded because of close coordination across multiple disciplines.

As design lead, I connected stakeholders to ensure the solution was both user-centered and technically feasible.

Key partnerships:

• Legal & Regulatory: Reviewed required disclosures across regions

• ADA Team: Validated accessibility of layouts, typography, and components

• SAP & OpenText Engineering Teams: Mapped regional rules into SAP logic, aligned templates with OpenText constraints, and validated accessibility and layout for scalable implementation

By positioning design as the central orchestrator, we balanced user comprehension, legal constraints, and technical feasibility, enabling smooth adoption across all regions.

Solution & Key Improvements

The redesign reduced bill length by 50% and significantly improved clarity, scannability, and usability.

Highlights:

• High-visibility Amount Due panel with clear breakdown

• Usage visualizations directly linked to cost impact

• Consistent placement of region-specific disclosures

• Larger baseline font + high-contrast typography

• Plain-language descriptions co-authored with legal and content design

• Streamlined payment and contact pathways

• Clear separation of delivery vs. third-party supplier charges

Constraints & Tradeoffs

Working in a highly regulated environment with legacy systems required compromises:

• Bill-generation tool limited certain design elements → maintained clarity through spacing and typography

• Figma-to-output font differences → manually recalibrated to meet ADA minimums

• Certain disclosures fixed by law in position

• Complex rate calculations and usage data could not be simplified

Despite these constraints, we preserved hierarchy, clarity, and accessibility across all regions.

Impact & Reflection

The redesigned bill delivers measurable improvements for both customers and the business.

Customers can quickly understand charges, usage, and supplier details, while accessibility audits confirmed full ADA/WCAG AA compliance with screenreaders.

Operationally, the system provides consistent layouts across jurisdictions, reduces errors, and is predicted to lower call center volume by ~25%. The modular, adaptive design also sets the stage for scalable updates as rates, regions, and templates evolve.

“For the first time, our customers can understand their bills at a glance, and the team has a clear, scalable system to maintain consistency across all regions.”
— Product Manager / Utility Team Lead

“This is one of the best bill redesigns we’ve seen in a long time. You can clearly see that the team listened to both customer feedback and regulatory requirements.”
— Representative, Operating Company

This project reinforced the value of cross-functional collaboration, legal partnership, and system thinking in regulated environments. It also proved that even complex, bureaucratic artifacts—like utility bills—can become intuitive, accessible, and educational when redesigned with clarity, modularity, and adaptability at the core.