iO Energy
Case Study
Role: UX UI Designer
Team: 20 Designers (4 Deliverable Agile Team)
Client: iO Energy
Timeline: 3 Weeks Design Sprint
Key Objective From Client:
To create a smooth end-to-end user experience flow. From initial consideration to the use of the bill comparison tool, and customer sign-up flow.
Rip the Brief Session:
As part of iO Energy’s mission, they wish to help Aussies understand their energy consumption, pay less and create conscious habits to help them become more aware of their energy consumption.
I see this as a two-step process when we unlocked the brief on achieving and building that trust with the user along every customer touchpoint.
How do we help users build knowledge about renewable energy and show them what iO Energy has to offer, and do differently? Guiding them through from brand awareness -> website -> bill comparison tool.
How do we support their decision-making process and build that trust along the way? Designing an architecture that navigates each user from bill comparison tool -> selection of plan -> sign-up flow.
Research Focus Area
Look into and understand the process/decision-making process of how household and business users choose their energy provider.
How do the community feel and their attitude towards renewable energy/ using solar panels?
Look into the current user flow and end-to-end onboarding process - what can be optimised and improved?
Surveys
We crafted and published two separate surveys - focusing on business and household energy users. This survey focused on questions that looked into demographic, occupation, current energy consumption habits, and billing methods.
Business Insight
62.5% felt that comparing prices was very important to them when selecting a provider
62.5% don’t use any kind of energy-saving practices in their business
Household Insight
70% consume their energy between 3 pm - 1 am
60% renting the property they currently reside in.
Household & Business Survey Result - Household (45 Respondents) Business (8 Respondents)
Interviews
To be able to dig deeper, and understand the users’ motivations, pain points, needs and wants - we conducted interviews with both business owners and household users.
We found that
“Honestly, I’m all for it (sustainable energy) but I’m just renting, so I don’t think I can put like a solar panel or any of that stuff and isn’t it expensive to switch?”
Australians have a positive attitude and mindset towards moving to renewable & clean energy; however, they perceive that it’s too hard and expensive to switch.
Household and Business Interview Questions & Findings - Household (18 Interviews) Business (10 Interviews)
So now that we have some research insights, let’s start unpacking our findings
Affinity Maps
To begin our define process we created an affinity map for residential and business owners. We did so by synthesising and categorising all the data collected into recurring themes.
Insights that we found to note were -
Lack of knowledge regarding clean & sustainable energy
Price and savings are a recurring theme as their main motivator
Bonus and incentives when signing up for a plan were highly regarded
Trust in the brand, its product and credibility in the market
Affinity Maps Business & Residential Findings
Empathy Maps
We moved into empathy mapping, and this is done by taking the key points from the affinity map. Through this, we could know who we were trying to empathise with, and understand the thoughts, feelings, pains and gains of how residential and business owners felt.
“Yeah I’m too busy running a business, but saving money is always important…I just haven’t really had the time to sit down and do any research, I think the whole comparison sites are sometimes so biased and if I change providers, it’s just such a hassle to get on the phone and get my stuff connected again”
Empathy Mapping Business & Household Users
Personas
Through insights and data gathered we generated characteristics to produce our two personas. As we have discovered there are two main users of iO Energy. The two personas will act as a blueprint for how we approach our solutions.
Meet business owner Sam and Residential user Julie.
Sam - is conscious of being sustainable, however, doesn’t have the time to conduct the research to justify the cost of renewable energy.
Julie - generally has no trouble with her bills, until she receives one that reads higher than normal, and can’t figure out why.
Journey Maps
Let’s look closely into both Sam and Julie's Customer Journey. Here we’re able to identify which areas of opportunity we can improve for both Julie and Sam.
This journey map will then help us during our ideation session workshops to think of all the pain points both Sam and Julie are experiencing and possible solutions to their pain points.
Now that we understand Sam & Julie’s journey a little bit better, how might we?
For Sam, we asked:
How might we educate Sam about the trustworthiness of a small business so that he is willing to make the change from a larger provider? And
How might we make it easy and clear for Sam to understand the benefits and costs associated with switching to a greener energy provider, so that he is happy with the process?
For Julie, we asked:
How might we build trust in iO energy for Julie by enhancing her understanding of renewables and the potential savings available?
How might we make the end-to-end sign-up process seamless to build Julie’s confidence so that she feels she has made the right decision?
Ideation
Note: Ideation session was split into Business & Household Session and we came back to further define the ideas along with iO Energy’s CTO.
After a quick revisit of Sam and Julie’s journey, we started our ideation workshop.
Defining Ideas
Our ideas were inserted into a Minimum Viable Product Matrix with the help of iO Energy’s CTO - we have a clear direction into which ideas are feasible to action from a development point of view.
Solutions Matrix
We created a solutions matrix that covers the users’ pain points, our solutions proposed and our hypothesis. We focused on the outcome rather than output and to do so we sorted our MVP Matrix to really cover which solution will have the biggest impact given the current scope and limitations. We proposed solutions for every touchpoint from marketing, pre-onboarding, onboarding and post.
As we split off into our small deliverable agile teams - I took the initiative to start looking into the billing tool in particular and working collaboratively with the website re-design team on several touch-points to introduce the bill comparison tool.
From research, we understood that there was a great need for Sam and Julie to be able to understand and learn more about renewable energy.
The goal of the website was to encourage users to use the bill comparison, understand their savings, identify the plan that suits their usage and finally sign up with iO — we created a user flow that reflects this thinking below
Website User Flow - Top (Julie), Bottom (Sam)
Bill Comparison Feature
When starting our design process, we wanted to create a streamlined and frictionless experience for Julie and Sam. We wanted them to achieve an end-to-end flow from uploading their bill, to report generation and finally help them in their decision-making process, building trust and credibility with the brand throughout the touch points.
Our agile team worked directly with the website re-design team to achieve this. (Note: iO Energy is currently working on building a new bill comparison tool, we worked on enhancing this experience)
Our design process involved:
Conduct usability testing and 1:1 Interviews on the current Bill comparison flow.
Created an uplifted flow with minor variations based on Sam and Julies’ pain points.
With every iteration we conducted multiple rounds of A/B testing, and follow-up interviews to uncover insights and user feedback.
Finished final iteration and discussed next steps.
Usability Testing
We tested the original bill comparison flow with an alternative flow of our own which had a small minor tweak. We tested with 10 Julies - Original flow (Flow A) received an average score of 6.9 for both ease of use and desirability - with 8/10 Participants favouring new flow (Flow B).
Through follow-up interviews, we uncovered and validated 4 issues that were brought to our attention - this ranged from unclear instruction leading to confusion to the need for clarity within the information and copy:
Users felt ‘confused’ about getting started with the billing tool -
“Do we drop and drag or where do we click to choose a file, can you change this to make it clearer for me?”
Account details page - users raised issues regarding collecting information
7/10 Julies were confused about the usage graph - a couple of points were raised regarding clarity surrounding pricing, cost of plans per month as opposed to per quarter, how much they will save, and how iO energy compares to their current provider.
A/B Testing - Updated flow with minor changes
Design For Clarity
Julie’s experience with the billing tool as we have seen from our usability testing results starts and ends with confusion and ambiguity. So, how do we create clarity for Julie and remove ambiguity and confusion? Using UI we created a design that is intuitive, visually accessible and easy to understand.
Original Flow High Fidelity
Updated flow High Fidelity
Results & Next Steps
Results
Another round of A/B testing was conducted. The average scores for ease of use and desirability had increased significantly compared to the original flow - they were 8.82 and 8.72 respectively with 100% of Julie preferring the updated flow.
We believe that we have proposed feasible, desirable, and viable solutions for both Julie and Sam. There are plenty of iterations and research needed to be done for the next steps outlined below in particular regarding how we present pricing and plan comparison to ensure we are doing our due diligence in providing accurate information in the best interests of Julie and Sam.
Next Steps
Iterate the design of the plan comparison table - working closely with the CTO & developers to pull out data and again rigorous A/B testing and iterating based on user feedback.
Key Learnings
Time was one of the biggest challenges, and I still believe that time-boxing is a really great skill that I have learnt from this project. Due to time limitations, this also brought another important learning from this project - which was the ability to prioritise areas that will give the most impact on our personas, focusing more on the impact.
thanks for reading!
thanks for reading through this project! hope to catch you in the next one :)