Evy Energy | User Groups

Summary

Introducing Private Charging Through User Groups

Private Charge Points are chargers which include private properties and are intended to be used only by a selected customer base.

Overview

I worked as user experience researcher and designer, closely collaborating with the engineering team and the founder of Evy.

I was responsible for the end to end design of the new feature called user groups, from user research to the final deliverables.

I attempted to ease out the flow in getting information through an engaging and effortless manner.

Duration

5 Weeks

Role

UX Designer

Client

Evy Energy :It enable and empower various stakeholders in the electric vehicle charging ecosystem to make better decisions and maximize ROI through our product portfolio.

Introducing User Groups

Secondary Research

Feature Addition

The Challenge

How do you make design decisions that move your product forward to appeal to a wider audience without alienating your current user base?

Understanding the Product

To add a new feature, I must understand how the product works. I conducted a detailed product research on Evy Charging to understand the factors and variables associated with the electronic vehicle charging market space.

Kickoff

As it is a major feature addition, I start off by creating a product specifications document, which helps me define the problem that we are trying to address by our new feature. I use this document as a starting point for our design solution.

Primary Research

Understanding Private Charge Points Management

User Research

I conducted semi-structured interviews with some private chargepoint managers for a deeper and more detailed understanding of the users characteristics, behaviors, and belief systems while charging their cars.The interview findings have been combined and portrayed from a first-person perspective.

Key Take Aways

Increasing number of EV users

This is someAs the fuel prices keep on rising, so does the common man’s inclination towards EVs. Lucrative offers by the government to EV vehicle owners and the increased focus on reducing carbon footprint worldwide is also incentivizing people to buy EVs. text inside of a div block.

Pvt chargerpoints managers wants better controls

The managers of private charge points want to control who uses their charge points and also provide better services to their customers in the form of excluse access and reduced rates.

Unintended People using chargepoints

Many unwanted customers are using the private charge points which has caused the intended customers to be left out. This problem will only increase as the number of EV users rises.

Opportunity

We aim to provide a solution in the form of a new feature that streamlines the experience of using private charge points for both managers and users. This will incentivise them to use Evy Charging as their management system.

Define

Problem Statement

After concluding the product and user research, I defined the problem statement concise manner as follows:

How can we provide a solution to the owners of private charge points to help them expand their user base?

Defining key issues

People

How can we shut out theunwanted customers?

Tariffs

How can we provide exclusive tariffs to our intended customers?

Availability

How can we reserve specific time slots for different groups at a charge point?

Exploring Strategies

Personalised Access

After defining the key areas we decided to provide a personalised access to user to provide them exclusivity and came up with the idea of Personalised access.Personalised acces will provide users subsidised tariffs, charging reservation

Defining Strategy

As we took a deep dive over the strategy we found out certain issues and patterns which led us to iterate and make it more efficient the common issues and overlaps are as follows

A lot of people have similar requirements

Managing the data of increasing number of users will be difficult

Providing personalised access to ever increasing ev users will be a hassle to the manager

Iterating Over Strategy

User Groups

The private charge points owner can create groups of users whom he wants to use the charge points. Any one outside of these groups will be unable to use them. The groups can also be allotted perks such as specific tariffs or specific use times.
This feature will generate much less data than our previous strategy. Grouping people with similar requirements is much easier than individually managing each user.

Ideation

Implementing User Groups

After iterating through and finalising the strategy, I started to ideate the feature requirements and user flows of the new feature.

Feature Requirements

Incentivising people to use private charge points

Providing user exclusivity and reserved access

User Groups dashboard to manage members and private charge points

Separate private charging section in evy dashboard

Charger specific custom tariffs and access hours

Bulk Addition of members to the group

Member addition via invite if not on the platform

Availability Schedule of charge points while setting access hours

Easily add or remove charge points after group creation

User Flows

I broke down the major tasks that the user would perform into flows. The flows helped me visualize the user experience while using the feature going forward. It also helped me figure out pain points and user drop offs so that I could iterate and enhance the user experience .

Deliver

Visual Design

I proceeded to make the final deliverables using the existing design system, grid and spacing guidelines for the final lap of the project.

Onboarding

Charge-connect Dashboard Flow

Learnings

EV Charging

I got first hand experience of the EV charging market and user base. I learnt about the various parameters involved in EV charging and how public and private charging differ from each other.

Feature addition in existing product

This experience taught that feature addition is not just simply building the solution ,but it is a multi-step process that involves understanding the ins and outs of the existing product, the design system and making the feature appeal to a wider audience without alienating current user base.