Public Utility — Youth Engagement Initiative

A major public utility needed to change water conservation behavior among middle school-aged kids — a notoriously hard audience to reach through traditional outreach. The vehicle was a digital game. The challenge was making it engaging enough that kids would actually play it, learn from it, and come back.

Highdive led the user experience research, conducting usability studies with kids representative of the target demographic — observing how they played, where they got confused, what held their attention, and what made them quit. Real behavioral observation, not adult assumptions about what kids would find fun.

Findings drove iterative design changes: new help screens, adjusted difficulty levels, added challenges, and clearer hints at friction points. The result was a game that kids actually played through — and came back to. A follow-on version with expanded features launched the following summer, accompanied by a supporting educational site.

The engagement is a useful reminder that CX methodology applies wherever a human being is trying to accomplish something — regardless of whether the touchpoint is an enterprise portal or a water conservation game.