Realtime Smart Energy Platform
A transformation project to re-platform and take all Smart data in-house and reduce reliability on 3rd party providers.
The overview
A project with OVO Energy An energy company that aims to "fuel human progress with clean, abundant energy for all."
The aim of this project was to create the first-of-its-kind, real-time energy billing platform.
Activities I carried out on this project;
- Stakeholder workshop facilitation
- Usability testing
- UX & UI Design
- Design Sprint Facilitation
- User Research (discovery)
I worked closely with two other designers and a researcher on this project from the start.
The challenge
We had the challenge of introducing a new energy product to our customers, utilising their real-time energy consumption data to bill them daily.
We'd previously ran a design sprint to kick off the project and to align the product team (developers, designers, product owners and the senior team). If you want to read more about the design sprint, I've written a separate post about this.
When tasked with such a large project, knowing where to start can be tricky. I'm a firm believer in, if we can prove the concept and first make it work, we then have something to work with, test with our users and of course, iterate on.
Insights and research
First making it work, is what we did. I worked alongside our developers, enabling us as a full stack team, to be delivering pieces of the product, one feature at a time. As you can see in the image below, we started out very basic, however, this was crucial in our learning, we were able to gain an understanding of what information was important to our customers, along with a level of understanding of how confident they felt in their own understanding of the information.
With our assumptions about this design as a team listed out and hypothesis created, we began on putting our designs to the test.
I set up and facilitated 3 consecutive rounds of research, spanning over 6 weeks, with 5 users in each round. Doing it in this timeframe allowed enough time in between each round for us to analyse and share what we'd learnt with the wider business, and make the necessary changes to the design.
What we did next
Following the 3 rounds of research, we evolved our product, changed the way we displayed numeric values, changed the hierarchy on the page and introduced some basic navigational functionality.
By taking this approach, and putting all the data and customer information on one page, it became overloaded, we needed to do something about this.
Before we ran ahead and designed some flashy menu structure, I wanted to understand how our users’ group certain pieces of information, to do this I firstly ran an online card sorting exercise, which over 100 of our customers had completed.
Next up was understanding why our customers grouped them the way they did and also, what would they call them. To understand this, I ran a further round of research in a lab to sit down and have a conversation with some energy customers.
Once we'd understood this, we introduced a menu structure to our site, keeping it simple, which resulted in smoother navigation and easier-to-find information.
The learnings
Starting out with the simplest thing, proving the concept and keeping focused on user needs, enabled us to build and learn continuously. We brought design, research, development and product together all aligned on creating the best product for the users and the business.
The outcome
This product was created over 9 months, started out as plain HTML in the web browser (first making it work), with each iteration we introduced another key piece of customer data, and with each step, we put our work to the test. At the end of my involvement with this project, we had scaled to having over 100,000 customers on the system and using the platform.
The impact
OVO has now split off into multiple companies, what was once Orion (this project) has now become Kaluza “The intelligent platform powering the future of energy” - This project was the cornerstone of Kaluza and driving OVO’s Plan Zero mission