Case Study - 🏠 Home App & Portal
The business wanted to create an app that will launch with our new home charging hardware to make charging at home convenient and cheaper for our customers. This app should also be compatible for our existing home charge customers/hardware.
This case study is a very high-level view of a super complex project, with a particular focus on the value proposition feature: Smart Scheduling.
Role
Design Lead
Duration
2020 - 2022
Client
bp pulse
Context
App & portal for new and existing home charging hardware
01
Problem Statement
Using public chargers is expensive and inconvenient – I want to utilise my off-peak energy tariff at home to charge my EV.
02
Value Proposition
Intuitive and flexible scheduling makes it easy to save money and charge your EV when it’s convenient for you. A holistic view gives you a deeper understanding into a new world of electric vehicle charging, whilst creating transparency and trust.
03
Hypothesis to Validate
EV owners want to charge their vehicle at home because it’s convenient and cheaper.
The best way to make charging at home cheaper and more convenient is to leverage the use of an app/portal to remotely control the charging unit and set charging schedules that align to the individual off-peak periods of the customers energy provider.
👆 Here is a list of the features that I ultimately delivered on this project. A lot of them used the double-diamond design framework, but this was only later in the project once all the ways of working between teams was fully established.
I helped define these KPI's early in the project lifecycle with the product manager so we could constantly measure the impact of new features and the product overall.
👆 Got hands-on with different apps and held a workshop between teams to identify opinions on what was good/bad.
I mapped some of the key feature processes as reference to move forward.
The impact of this work was to give a baseline of where competitors were with their home charging apps so I could present this back to key stakeholders.
👆 To research the value proposition - scheduling - I looked at how some different industries tackled this complex task.
After digging into the intricacies of their mechanisms, I learned that a lot can do basic scheduling across single days, but none could really be adapted to handle the complexities of clashes, overriding schedules and multi-day schedules (which would be required a lot in EV home charging for off-peak tariffs)
👆 Created alongside a Service Designer I was working with on this project - This diagram shows exactly how complex the product lifecycle was for home charge.
With around 9 separate touchpoints, including external suppliers to conduct surveys, carry out installations and provide integrated API's - there were a lot of moving parts to be mindful of when designing any feature.
👆 The live marketing website where a user can order a home charge unit.
An API provided by SwitchCraft allows the look-up of the user's home energy provider based on records of address.
I used this functionality to parse thru to the app, so as a user opens the app for the first time, they will see that their energy provider is already set up for them (as some users may not know the details of this themselves) - allowing the app to deliver a surprise and delight moment!
04
Moving on to Design
Armed with the research and an idea of where I would like to take the scheduling feature of the app - I moved into the design phase. Below are some examples after the initial wireframes and testing were completed for a general direction.
👆 During lockdown, I set up some unmoderated testing sessions specifically to gain insights about the scheduling feature and how easy and understandable it was for users.
I set out a task list and observed how paid subjects (different backgrounds) went through the flow of a low fidelity wired prototype.
Recording and categorising the findings into DoveTail was the next step so I could create a report for the next actionable areas (as seen below).
The risk associated with this type of testing is that that users were not all in the context of a purchase journey of a home charge unit - but restrictions at the time governed the extent of testing I was allowed to carry out.
👆 Getting into the field is invaluable. Here was a first time, real test for the scheduling feature.
To see how our home charge units are installed, connected, set-up and used was something I jumped at the chance to do often. It allowed me to test features, the real-time information relay, the physical and practical functions of the units and crucially identify pain-points that real-life users go through.
By this time (mid-late '21) I was aligning the UI of the app to the newly introduced 'bp core design system'. I went on to have a pivotal part in creating a 'bp pulse' specific library sub-branch and contributing to more sustainable design practises for future designers of bp pulse.
05
Result
Home charge was truly a monster of a project, kicked-off at the time the company was tackling a large scale-up, covid and organisational change. The project itself had so many moving parts and restrictions (in terms of hardware) that a lot of the basic features were challenges in themselves to solve.
I was the lead designer on this one, aided by two part-time contractors - so it was really on me from a design standpoint to navigate the rocky roads of this project.
The app and web portal were launched to our customers at the beginning of 2021 and continue to serve thousands of bp pulse home customers with an app store rating of 4.65 ⭐️ and continued tracking of KPI's 📈.