Proud: Energy consumption monitoring made easy

Background

Many businesses are motivated to have their own app to keep up with the times or their competition. 'Everyone has one, so we should as well', I hear. And when I do, I always try to start the debate about whether there's more to it; any "real" reason and business case. Not "just because", but to optimize resources, automate, expand, improve customer experience, and so on.

Due to their nature, this particular client, the country's major energy distributor, has no need to compete for customers. It was, therefore, refreshing to see the primary objective be improving customer experience and find new ways to monetize data.

With the goal of making right by the app's slogan "All of your energy consumption in your pocket", we embarked on a year-long journey to redesign Proud.

Challenge

Unsurprisingly, energy is one of those topics that everyone encounters in life as a necessity, but rarely an interest. Initially, we found a significant disparity between what the business and customers regarded as "common knowledge". Simply put, the users found the features of the app fascinating and helpful, but only once they were explained that those features are even there.

Our main objective, lifting the burden off the employees by automatizing new processes, became to make the world of energy more friendly to the users, making them happier and more independent. It became clear soon enough that to accomplish that, the redesign would need to be rather radical.

Solution

Based on a rigorous series of interviews and usability testing, we restructured the most challenging user flows in the app and erased the discovered barriers to entry into the app.

During our work, we redesigned the application head-to-toe, so to speak, designing a brand new user interface, significantly changing the tone of voice and microcopy, restructuring the sitemap and many user flows.

I was happy to see the testament to our work as not only the spike in downloads and usage, but improvement of rating from 2.7 to 4.3 across app stores.

Note: The development has been overtaken by a different supplier as of now. The visuals and description showcase the range of work done while me and my team were working on Proud.