Design Development of an Energy Supplier Application Focusing on the User Experience

Abstract

What do customers want from an energy supplier application? To meet the increasing
digitalization of the society, the energy supplier Kraftringen strives to create a new application that will match the customer’s needs and Kraftringen’s vision. This thesis was performed in order to present a user interface proposal of Kraftringen’s new application, to improve the user experience. The goals included an exploration of what users want and expect from an energy supplier, and how users are best motivated to increase their environmental awareness. Throughout the interaction design process, the focus on and involvement of users have been central, to ensure a final user interface proposal that from the user’s perspective is intuitive and pleasing to use. Needs and desires of both Kraftringen, Kraftringen’s customers and energy supplier customers in general were established by evaluating the company and their current application, combined with a data collection consisting of earlier performed investigations, tools for statistics and a customer survey through a focus group and a questionnaire. Together with theoretical design and usability principles, possible solutions
were iteratively created as low and high fidelity prototypes and successively evaluated through user tests. A final prototype was developed and evaluated in an assessment test containing 20 users together with a heuristic evaluation to determine the user experience. Both the theoretical heuristic evaluation and the empirical assessment test of the final user interface proposal indicates a good user experience. A System Usability Scale score above average was obtained of the final proposal. The proposal provides a user interface that the majority of involved users consider as well structured with relevant functions and a pleasing design and layout. The evaluation of the user interface also indicates that users think that they would use the application and that the application motivates users to become more environmentally aware.

Popular Abstract

What do customers want from an energy supplier application? To achieve a good user experience, most people want an application that is fun and will make them feel in control regarding mainly their usage, invoices, contracts and possible outages. They also want to be informed about how to reduce their environmental footprint, but not too much, since this will create guilt and result in the application not being used.

Digitalization is an ever growing force in our society and it manifests itself in all kinds of businesses. The demands from customers regarding digital solutions are high and one industry that is working on meeting these demands today is the energy business. The energy industry today is regarded as a low interest industry. This entails that people in general are not very interested in knowing very much about their energy usage, partly since electricity is something that is usually taken for granted. The industry is also considered to be an industry which people have low faith in. At the same time, the planet’s environment, which the energy industry is closely linked to, is in general opinion of very high interest today.
Many people today want to be aware of, and want to reduce their environmental footprint as much as possible. People are prepared to dedicate both time, money and effort in order to do this, but they first need to be informed of how to do it.

The final prototype that was presented as a solution to meet Kraftringen’s and their customer’s needs can be seen in figure 1 and 2. The proposal entails easy access to the main functions usage, invoice, contract and outages, as well as an easy overview of all the features in the application and a recurrent focus on environmental awareness. The user interface is designed to convey stability and confidence for customers, but also to introduce innovation and happiness to the app, among other things through the use of a mascot.

In the interaction design development, the end users were iteratively considered and involved, for example through tools for statistics, a focus group, questionnaires and successive user tests. Using a combination of theoretical design and usability principles, the final proposal was created, and its user experience was evaluated both theoretically and empirically. During the user tests, the level of environmental focus was evaluated, and it was discovered that an excessive amount of information or encouragement would be perceived as unpleasant or invasive.

Both a heuristic evaluation and an assessment test of the final user interface proposal, indicates a good user experience. The proposal provides a user interface that the majority of involved users consider as well structured with relevant functions and a pleasing design and layout. The evaluation of the user interface also indicates that users think that they would use the application and that the application motivates users to become more environmentally aware.

• author: Borglund, Ayla and Giver, Julia
• supervisor: Günter Alce; Johannes Sporre
• organization: Ergonomics and Aerosol Technology
• course: MAMM01 20191
• year: 2019
• type: H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
• subject: Technology and Engineering
• keywords: UX, UI, Interaction design, User test, Prototyping, Environmental awareness
• language: English
• id: 8986007
• date added to LUP: 2019-06-24 13:03:36
• date last changed: 2019-06-24 13:03:36