Ameren Illinois Savings Website
Roles
Project Manager, Lead UX Designer
Final Product
Overview
The Ameren Illinois Energy Efficiency Program helps residents and businesses save money on their energy bills while reducing strain on the electric grid. Serving roughly three-quarters of Illinois’ geographic area and more than 1.2 million customers, the program plays a critical role in delivering incentives, energy-saving products, and educational resources that make efficiency accessible and impactful across the state. A website redesign was needed to enhance the user experience, streamline navigation, and enable customers to quickly access the resources they need.
Problem
Originally launched in 2008 with a small set of incentives, the program expanded over time to include numerous initiatives, products, and educational resources. As content grew, the website became increasingly cluttered and difficult to navigate, forcing users to dig through multiple pages to find relevant information. Key user tasks—such as locating incentives or understanding eligibility—became harder to complete, and aging functionality led to broken or inconsistent experiences. The site no longer aligned with user expectations, making a comprehensive UX-driven reset necessary.
Project Goals
Implement a new navigation system that simplifies the site structure and enables users to quickly find relevant incentives, resources, and program information.
Push the boundaries of Ameren’s brand guidelines while maintaining clarity, consistency, and trust.
Optimize site accessibility and SEO to improve usability, discoverability, and compliance.
Introduce a navigational chatbot designed to guide users to key content, with the flexibility to expand its capabilities over time.
Expand and organize educational content—including tips, case studies, and videos—so users can easily find help for their home or business.
Analysis and Planning
As project manager and design lead, I recognized early that this redesign required significant upfront planning before any visual design began. As the program expanded, it had been divided into multiple areas—Business, Residential, Multifamily, Market Development Initiative, and Program Allies—each with dedicated subject-matter experts.
I led a series of working sessions with division leaders across marketing and executive stakeholders to audit, consolidate, and streamline content. The goal was to reduce duplication, combine pages where possible, and create clearer copy and calls to action that minimized user friction. These sessions took place over the course of a month and formed the foundation of the new site structure.
In parallel, I gathered qualitative user insights from the call center, whose staff provided critical feedback on where customers were getting stuck and what information they struggled to find. To support the scale of the project, I also led the effort to hire a local design firm to partner with our in-house team, ensuring we had the capacity to execute efficiently.
With stakeholder alignment, user insights, and a full design team in place, the project was ready to move into execution.
Pictured above: views of original sitemap layout and wireframes.
Design Phase
After aligning on project goals and reviewing consolidated user feedback and data, we defined the site’s information architecture through a new sitemap and wireframes. With the structure in place, we moved into prototyping both core page templates and advanced features, including the mega menu, embedded forms, interactive infographics, SVG maps, a custom resource library, and the chatbot layout and design.
Throughout the design process, SEO and accessibility best practices were integrated alongside page and content development to ensure the site was performant, discoverable, and usable from launch.
Pictured above: view of prototypes for business, residential, market development initiative, program ally and multifamily page types.
Chat Bot
The chatbot quickly evolved into a dedicated sub-project of its own. I led collaborative working sessions with the core group of content experts to map user pathways for each primary audience, starting with business users. These discovery meetings helped define clear, task-based flows and ensured the chatbot aligned with real user needs.
The result was Wattson, a branded, friendly guide designed to help users navigate the site efficiently. To increase visibility and engagement, we created an animated version to capture attention as well as physical sticker assets for energy efficiency events. While Wattson currently focuses on site navigation, the framework was intentionally designed to scale, allowing future expansion into more advanced user support and functionality.
Pictured above: chatbot pathway sample, Interface, Wattson icon, Wattson animated gif, Wattson sticker 1 and 2.
Solution and Results
From planning through launch, the project spanned one year and delivered measurable results. Through careful research, cross-team collaboration, and strong project management, we redesigned the website to directly address core user and business goals. The final solution delivered a seamless navigation experience, a custom UI that pushed brand boundaries while staying compliant, improved SEO and accessibility, the introduction of a navigational chatbot, and an expanded, easy-to-browse educational content library.
The new site launched at the beginning of Q3, allowing for a clear comparison between the first and second halves of 2025. In that time, website views doubled and average time on page increased by 40%. The close collaboration between content experts, designers, and external partners proved highly effective, resulting in a significantly improved user experience backed by strong performance metrics.