Filter articles
Catalyst Starter lights up Orion’s user experience
Learn how Orion improved their user experience by using Catalyst Starter.
Orion New Zealand Limited is an electricity distribution company based in Christchurch, New Zealand. Orion provides power to central Waitaha Canterbury and electricity to over 225,000 homes and businesses. The Orion website is a hub of electricity information that is essential to access - with content ranging from how you can get electricity connected, what you need to know during an outage, where you can find EV charging stations and more. To level up the user experience for their customers, Orion decided it was time to review their website and go to market.
Opportunity
Orion had been using the New Zealand Content Management System (CMS) Silverstripe for their website and after ten years had decided it was time for a refresh. Orion wanted a UX website review from a CMS vendor and approached Catalyst to identify quick changes they could make. However, after the review, Orion and Catalyst agreed that a larger redesign and rebuild was necessary to achieve their goals.
From the user feedback, it was clear how the information was displayed (the information architecture) was out of date. After the review, Orion chose to partner with Catalyst for an initial discovery and solution design phase, which developed into an ongoing support agreement.
Solution
Catalyst partnered with Orion as a single project team. With a tight deadline, we operated in a waterfall discovery and solution design approach. We planned work linearly with all requirements and objectives upfront. In the discovery phase, we produced functional and non-functional requirements and a technical options paper providing a high-level overview of potential approaches.
In the solution design phase, we:
- defined the technical stack to meet the non-functional requirements
- iteratively produced and refined wireframes (to communicate the structure of the website) and visual design assets
- built out a grouped backlog of user stories for our software developers to convert to working functionality.
Catalyst Starter
From this, Orion made an informed decision to redesign and rebuild the site on the latest version of Silverstripe to provide ongoing cost-saving and flexible options moving forward. We agreed to use Catalyst Starter, a pre-built Silverstripe CMS, which has commonly requested features flexible to any sector and is compliant with WCAG 2.2 guidelines.
The build phase took a sprint approach, with each feature undergoing accessibility, functional, and User Acceptance Testing before being accepted. The go-live was executed cleanly by following our go-live checklists. We launched on an agreed date and time with all hands on deck for smoke testing once the site was live.
A strong project team
"We partnered with Catalyst for the requirements, design, and scope to completely rebuild www.oriongroup.co.nz. Our time frames for delivery were tight, and from the outset, Catalyst set up a strong project team to meet this timeline and deliver."
- Erin Webley, Digital Channels Lead, Orion Group
Catalyst’s expertise brought value to the project
"From scope to development, testing and supporting our own user acceptance testing and then going live, Catalyst’s expertise brought value to the project. A well-scoped project meant there were no surprises, and we got what was designed."
- Erin Webley, Digital Channels Lead, Orion Group
"Our key engagement statistics have lifted considerably since we launched our new site."
Contact us
With go-live now behind us, we’re planning the next set of enhancements with Orion as we get started on the ‘maintain and make better’ phase of our journey together.
Contact us to learn how our CMS team can best support you to achieve your goals.
Services provided
- Content management systems
- Business analysis
- Discovery
- User research
- Solution design
- UX and UI design
- Information architecture
- Visual design
- Web accessibility
- Development
- QA testing
- Project management.
