Project Overview

Team consists of 2 UX designers / 2 UI designers / 1 UX writer / 3 developers / 2 quality assurance engineer / 1 product owner

“LINE Electricity Housekeeper” is Taiwan’s first home energy management service cooperated with Taipower, providing free online and real-time household electricity report, 52 energy saving tips, and more electricity related games to thousands of family. It’s an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to test the acceptance of the market; therefore, only people who applied to this 1-year campaign and are approved by us would be able to access this service.

Design Process

Research

Hypothesis

From the research results, we had few hypothesis:
✦ There are significant differences in the demand preferences of different consumer groups
✦ The three user groups, ranked by their preference for current product features, are shown above
✦ Providing detailed analysis or records of electricity usage can help generate energy-saving strategies
✦ Understanding the electricity usage patterns of others or participating in community competitions can motivate individuals to improve their own electricity usage behavior

Besides survey for users, we also conducted a stakeholder interview to seek a sweet spot between users’ pain and business goal for this product. From the interview, we found out that the stakeholders care a lot about the number of active users to participate in demand response, which requires a huge user base. The other business viewpoints and the accordingly design goals are as followed:

✦ Become the leading role in the field of home energy management by providing useful and desirable services to the right customers


✦ Get access to users’ electricity data from Taipower and eventually become a resource aggregator to solve demand response problem by dispatching home energy to where it’s needed

✦ Since this is an MVP for the global version app, lower any design and development cost if possible

✦ Having 100+ active users (1000+base) in 3 months

✦ Decreasing behavioral errors/confusion and customers support costs

✦ Receiving users’ positive feedback (through survey from in-app service at the lowest cost)

Competitive Analysis

I studied a few electricity related services to identify patterns and catalog their offerings to users.

To begin with, Taiwan’s biggest and only power company’s app has a very similar position with our solution, with electricity visualization and more useful functions, such as paying bills or payment record. However, according to the comments on Play Store, most users complained that the complex functions make it harder to use and lead to frequent errors. I also conducted interviews in person with 5 other users and received the similar feedbacks.

On the other hand, I compared an app based in Japan, "Power Saving Challenge by Tohoku Electric Power App" (with 50K+ users), which encourages users to reduce their consumption at a certain time of a day to balance the electricity grid at a national level. If the users succeed, they will earn points/discount based on the amount they reduced.

Therefore, we aim to absorb the pros and avoid the cons of the Taipower APP by adding only essential functions (e.g. electricity & bill visualization) and combine the power saving challenge with on the Japanese app in our service, so that there won’t be too many complicated features that make the product scale too huge to be controlled. We convergence our fancy thoughts to adequate and helpful functions that are just enough for our users to ease their pain.

Define

Starting with questions...

To help us better align our user’s tasks and goals, we created a list of ‘How Might We…’ questions:

Problem Statement

How can our solution help?

Different from other services, we hope our users check the real-time status of their electricity use and bill at their fingertips. Therefore, we chose “LINE” as our service platform, which has 21 million LINE users in Taiwan (that’s over 90% of the whole population), with a weekly usage rate of 93%. This also significantly lowers the development cost compared to an app.Moreover, we want users to be able to set their own budgets while receiving real-time notifications in the chatroom when an exceeded amount is detected. Once they notice the high demand of the electricity, they will be able to visualize the data with clear charts, which help them make better decisions in electricity-consuming behaviors.In addition to notifications, users can play games and earn points when they complete the game so that they find it interesting to save energy and become more willing to do so.

Ideate

Prototype

After we locked down the functions, I started sketching wireframes and turned into a prototype for further validating and testing. Below are some of the high fidelity prototypes I made after 4 weeks of researching and defining problems.

Validate

Before moving into development, I conducted 5 unmonitored usability testings based on the above prototypes to tweak and refine the design. The key findings and the adjusted designs are shown below:

For “My Meter”

✦ Users who have 2 or more meters needed to sign up with different LINE account as one meter can only be bound to one account. Therefore, multi-meter management is needed.

✦ Users would like to share information about their meters with family members or roommates while receiving electricity alerts.

✦ This way, we transform them from passive recipients into energy activists, who not only take control of their energy lives but also positively affect other family members as a whole.

For “Electricity Report”

✦ When users have multiple meters, it’s hard to tell which meter they’re looking at and which electricity plan is applied for the calculation of the bill, thus being able to switch meters and showing the details would be more helpful.

✦ Besides billing info, users would also like to check their consumption calculated in kWh to check their real amount of usage since the price differs by the time of the day.

For “Mission Challenge”

✦ Users would like to receive notification about the status of the mission in the LINE chatroom (a reminder before, the beginning and the result of the challenge).

✦ Users did not know how to reduce a certain amount of electricity consumption. Any advice or suggestion for their behavioral changes would be appreciated (e.g. turning off AC for 2 hours can reduce 1 kWh on average).

✦ Therefore, I illustrated and created the content of 52 Energy Omamori (energy saving tips) on LINE chatroom to give users some ideas of accomplishing their mission goal.

✦ This challenge is only available every 2 months. After testing ,we received feedbacks that shows it would be better if there could be an electricity-related game that user can play every day.

✦ Therefore, we designed another game, “electricity calculator”, for user to engage more in our app. I was in charge of the UX/UI and writing here!

UI Design

Once the usability issues were resolved, we moved on to design the final screens. Our goal was to create a visual identity that’s aligned with the brand’s values and message, which is: “making energy count”.

UX Writing

Good UX writing not only makes interfaces more usable but it also builds trust. As the only and the first UX writer, I established a corporate-level writing guideline that applies for all the products and services in the company to make our copies embody the voice of the brand, and help writers stay consistent in format even in various languages.

Workshop

Right after the project kickoff, we organized a discovery and empathy workshop to understand how we could create a memorable impression for our product. We invited not only designers but also stakeholders, Marketing and Product Team to brainstorm user scenarios from a broader point of views.

Throughout the process, we came to a consensus to focus on redefining our corporate mascot – ECO-chan (the yellow fluffy elf).

We defined ECO-chan’s characteristics as energetic, adorable, ditzy, reliable, satisfied, heartwarming and visionary.

We invited ECO-chan to our product as a bridge between business and users. He is also an ambassador that guides users through the journey and convey our ideas.

Final Design

Once the usability issues were resolved, we moved on to design the final screens. Our goal was to create a visual identity that’s aligned with the brand’s values and message – “making energy count”.

Media Posts

1.https://agirls.aotter.net/post/60361
2.https://today.line.me/tw/v2/article/JPJrDrq
3.https://www.sogi.com.tw/articles/nextdrive/6257491

Next Steps & Takeaways

Next Steps

All and all, by visualizing household electricity use, we successfully reached 100+ active users (1000+base) in 3 months. Furthermore, we conducted a survey 2 months after the service is launched. Nearly 70% of our active users claimed that electricity visualization and the idea of making energy count eventually result in action and behavioral changes in real life!

However, due to Taipower's policy and the project's schedule, we haven't got a chance to really host a "Power Saving Challenge" yet. If we reached an adequate user base and thus are able to host a power saving challenge, I would love to see how users react to it and how it impact the environment and society as a whole.

Takeaways

It was definitely a huge challenge for me to study related electricity regulations, understand all the hardware (meter, gateways) limits, and help our users reach their saving goals while assisting businesses to collect users' electricity resources. Though we struggled to complete the project within 1 year, thanks to all members in HEMS team, we eventually made it! I had such a great luck to work with them.

In order to meet the time of our product launch, we adopted agile development and run sprints for this project. This was actually my first time running in a scrum team. I've learned how to collaborate efficiently with other designers, product owners/managers, and developers, quality assurance engineers as well as communicate with the stakeholders. The best things I love are sharing new insights and working out problems with the team in our daily and retro meetings. This not only helped ensure that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals but also enhanced our team relationships.

Besides, I've learned iteration and testing is essential and indispensable. Based on feedback from users and stakeholders, we had continually and frequently tested, refined our solutions, which helped us identify issues earlier and make improvements to the design before moving into development or service launch.

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