Uplight

Rate Education Reports

Role: Lead Designer & Researcher

Overview

Uplight is a market leader in the energy customer’s experience. Their solutions range from load shift, to asset acquisition and enrollment, and now rate management and behavior change focused on savings.

My task was to design a product to compete in the marketplace that would be the front runner to all rate education and enrollment processes for Uplight and our clients.

  • Plan it.

    It all begins with a client request and a competitors existing solution. In order to meet requirements and client expectations, we needed to plan and explore fast to create our own product ready to go to market in less than one year's time that would address all usability concerns and complications.

  • Build it.

    With internal and external research and discovery done, we shifted into the build and design phase. Many internal rounds of iteration were completed to hone and expand upon ideas and opportunities. Then a final design was agreed upon for testing.

  • Test it.

    We conducted several rounds of testing and iteration to improve the product and solve new usability concerns concerning new elements. We conducted moderated and unmoderated studies as well as a journal study with users after launch.

Designing an experience

A core piece of the problem for Rate Education Reports (RERs) was how they were going to play into our overall suite of products focused on rates. We took this into testing and planning from the onset and thought collectively about product-to-product interactions and experience.

Not only did this introduce a diverse set of required testing and methods, it also required us to be creative and thoughtful about our entire design system and product suite. This lead to great collaboration across teams and product lines throughout the process.

Iterative design

Based on competitive research in the market and testing we did on our competitor’s product, we were able to hone in and focus our designs on improvements customers and the market were asking for.

With a strong base product of our own, we then began addressing specific issues that came up in our testing and from client conversations about complex and complicated modules, data visualizations and functionality.

It became clear that we’d need accurate data integrations and very precise and readable visuals to allow users to understand their rates and options. We organized tests, testing and synthesis accordingly.

Launching a final product

One of the greater challenges of this product was the diversity of the mediums it would exist in — solving for print, mobile and desktop proved to be a challenge regarding consistency and functionality.

In our post-launch testing and studies, we learned some features were not performing as well in certain formats. This required us to plan for future enhancements and changes down the road.

We ultimately created an entire outbound communications suite of variable products that could adapt to a user based on their data — each version would be different in subtle ways unique to the user and provide a custom and valuable experience.

Overall, our RER wound up outperforming the competition in conversion and success metrics by 3x, resulted in a 60% increase in customer satisfaction, secured recurring revenue for Uplight and a made for a very happy client!

Post launch study 

Not only were we concerned with client satisfaction and usability, we also wanted to learn how effective the product and process was at reducing a users energy usage and costs.

To do this, we found real users to join a study over the course of four months and tracked their usage and spending as well as other quality and satisfaction metrics.

The results were promising and suggested positive behavior change and impacts for users, and a reduction of peak hour usage.