Rethinking The Delivery of Traditional Commodity Services and Role of Energy Providers

The client -a global provider of electricity, natural gas, and energy services- has collaborated with Fjord to rethink the delivery of traditional commodity services. They wanted to embrace a role as a facilitator between the tenants and building managers to improve awareness about energy consumption.                                         

We aimed to transform client' retail business model through disruptive new services which would improve the current customer experience and re-position the energy provider (client) as an enabler in the condominium environment.  In this strategic design project, I've worked as Interaction Designer and involved in the process of creating and prototyping the future service concepts that will help also in defining the global design strategy for our client. I was also responsible for communicating with developers and delivering a video that tells the story of the new service concept.

Research

First, we immersed in the Italian context, we conducted interviews with customers (tenants and building managers) and stakeholders (sales and operational managers). Our research findings lead us to create personas and as is journeys where we highlighted customers' pain points and traced their current experience. Lack of communication between building managers and tenants, Unclear and not transparent decision-making process within the condominium, lack of information about service providers and their offerings and Lack of understanding about the key moments of energy consumption were some of the main pain points.

Ideation

Fjord ran a co-creation workshop with the client. We envision the ideas together to drive innovation within the energy world.  We also had a prototyping session to revive these ideas in a mobile app concept which helped us to create pillars for the future MLP (Minimum lovable product). Having these co-creation moments with the client was invaluable, it has not only showed how design thinking and design ideas can address the pain points in the current experience but also provide a roadmap for the client. 

Design & Prototyping

desıgn concept

The challenge was to design with two perspectives in mind the tenant and the building manager. Since we wanted to keep interaction light and decision-making easy, the user flows are quite simple. The user -in this case its the tenant- logins and lands in the home page where s/he can scroll vertically to see his profile and building information. This concept of HP is inspired by “Bacheca” (message board in Italian). In a second level, the user has features related to building as issuing a ticket, voting in condominium meetings, and so on.  From the Building Manager view is similar except the home page where he can select which building is under his portfolio. There is also an editorial content which is the same for both users since one of the objectives of this concept is to inform the users about better energy consumption. 

Design Sprints

After the prioritization of flows with the client, we've run 3 sprints. I was involved in the flow of ticketing an issue about the building (from tenants perspective) and also the feature of live voting during condominium meetings (visuals below). I've iterated ideas from an interaction point of view together with a developer, and then created a high fidelity prototype that later was used in user testing and client feedback.

Design principles applied

USER TESTING

Outcomes

The project involved me in a very unique environment, it brought to light that there are approx 300,000 building managers in Italy, together with the client we created an opportunity of connecting them with their tenants that are even more in number, this app has the potential of not only suggest new services but to educate on better energy consumption.  I was responsible of making a video for the last presentation showing the service concept and the prototype as one, this material gave us an upper hand in validating our work to our client, because intermediately this video became shared internally between them.