While energy has traditionally been a regulated market without any user choice, that is now changing in many states. Through the a significant portion of the United States, consumers now have the opportunity to choose their energy provider. For consumers that are shopping around, energy companies needed to provide a differentiator in their services.

In the past, these energy providers have had little incentive to provide their users with quality user experience. Now great customer service and technology this can be what differentiates them from their competitors. For many consumers, it is a challenge to perform simple tasks on provider’s websites, like bill payment or signing up for service setup. However, basic functionality was not our only goal. Similar to the boom in financial apps in the last few years, there is a lot of room in the energy space to help users understand how they’re consuming energy and easy ways they can save money.

After two weeks, we had a visual prototype that Sapient Consulting could take on pitches to energy providers. The video showcases all of the interactions, including the registration flow, looking a summary of your bill, paying your bill, and viewing your usage by month and application.

Prior to this project, Sapient had put together a series of research with another team. We spent about a day and a half at the beginning of the project going through all of their research and materials, as well as looking through the deliverables they put together, including a short video of a user journey. This gave us a strong foothold moving forward.

The rest of our research was done throughout the design ideation process. Everyone on the team brought in a copy of their energy bill so we had a cross section of a different energy companies and how they communicated the information to their customers. We also did a quick comparative analysis of how popular financial apps, like Mint, Personal Capital, and Chase, explain complicated information to their users.

From our research we found that the way energy companies present data to users is both dense and not actionable. Overwhelmingly, users want to consume less energy, either to lower their carbon footprint or simply save themselves money. These are strong motivators, but the information their energy companies doesn’t help them learn how to change their behavior. Laying out data clearly and giving the users actionable tasks were our main focus and drove our decision making throughout the design process.