A collaborative energy provider
SERVICE DESIGN MASTER— INTERACTION DESIGN
With new technologies and an increasing awareness of how interactions can significantly change communication to the better, energy providers have a huge potential to come closer to their users’ needs.
Except they don’t.
Our teacher in Interaction Design gave us a real case for redesigning the services of an energy provider. She distributed 5 different personas with their respective very similar customer journey.
Lack of communication, of clarity, of transparency and of availability were common pain points to all of them.
They also shared the need of being more conscious about their own consumption.
Problem
The persona that was assigned to my group was Anja, a young lawyer who worked long hours and did not want to waste time in understanding bills. She preferred to spend time cooking with her friends and go hiking (who can blame her?).
Analysing thoroughly her customer journey , we discovered her main needs concerned:
- a personalized service according to her lifestyle
- clear consumption information and tips on how to decrease consumption
-guidance for choosing the best tariff
-possibility to have a collaborative and sharing platform to use with her flat mates.
Solution
We designed a story board describing the services of a new energy company that was user friendly, collaborative and communicative.
We called it e-va to give it a more humanized character.
The services that e-va would provide are:
— share information and bill with your flatmates
— monthly notification with detailed information about consumption and bill
— notification when consumption is higher than average
— tips about how to reduce consumption
— video tutorial about how to use the service and about energy consumption
— friendly and 24/7 available support
Prototype
Due to time constraint we prototyped only the option to share information and bill with flatmates. We did a low-fi paper prototype, although here I show a partial digitized version.
With e-va you can choose already at sign up if you want to create a personal or group account.
When group account is chosen, members can be added.
The members can change their contact information and delete themselves from the group when they, for instance, change accommodation.
You can also personalize how you want to split the bill between members (evenly or partially) and which payment method you prefer to use.
At payment you can clearly see which member has paid or not, thus opening up for reminders.
Energy saving tips and consumption information provided by the service can be shared through IM, in order to enhance collaboration between the members.
User test
The aim was to test the idea and if the interaction flow made sense.
There were lots of discussions and ideas that were put on hold during the process and user testing gave us useful insights about some features we were not sure about.
One of them was the bill issue. Would everybody pay their part directly in the app/web or would one person be responsible for the payment?
The first option would be better for the users, but could it be complicated to administrate for the company?
We opted for the possibility for every member to pay their part directly in the app, but then an other discussion arose. What happens if a person does not pay? Is it good if it shows on the app, so that flatmates can act upon it? Would it be appropriate that the app sent reminders or would it be rather an issue that could be solved among flatmates?
We didn’t design the reminders, but let this part be open for testing.
Our tester had lived with flatmates, but when she was presented with the option of creating a group account she asked the reason why…
She really liked the fact that you can change how to split the bill in percentage: “If I am on vacation for one month I don’t want to pay my entire part!”. We also designed this option in case of newly moved in flatmates that haven’t been living in the flat for the whole month.
She was also a big fan of the clear information about consumption. She would have liked it to be even more detailed, in order to track if any of the flatmates was consuming more than others (for instance, if the flatmate brought home a guest for some days). Fair enough :)
About the bill payment, she liked the option of paying in a split mode. She would have liked the app to send reminders to the person that was late with payment but would have also liked the option of being able to pay for that person. This latter part was something that surprised us…
Another aspect that she found essential, and that we probably haven’t had time enough to design for, was credibility and payment safety.
What I’ve learnt is that to design according to user behaviour really should make you think of all possible scenarios (or at least as many realistic scenarios as possible). Flexibility (and generosity, in our case) can never been underestimated!
In short: Methods and skills
Problem Statement:
Clustering
Empathy map
Prototype:
Story Board
Design Critique
Lo-fi prototyping (card board and paper)
Validation:
User test (script, recording, interacting, learnings)
Skills:
I contributed with my analytical and critical skills, with idea generation, with interacting with the user during user test and with my project management attitude to move the project forward when we got stuck.
