Utility Customer Experiences

ABOUT

At Oracle Utilities, we have learned through multiple conversations that customers struggle to understand utility bills and hardly care about being energy efficient. We want our customers to start caring about this.

TEAM

Research and Insights

Utility customers

remember things differently from what actually could’ve happened in a bill period

easily forgot certain types of appliances

seldom understand how weather, rates, usage and other related factors affect a bill

Design Strategy

1. How do we create strong defaults for our product offering?
2. How can we create the perception that we were best-in-class and innovative?
3. How do we create a pathway for more tailored experiences down the road?

Key Experience Areas

Here are some critical web experiences I owned to serve our utility customers.

1. Device-level Disaggregation

Helps customers understand costs and energy use per appliance used at home

2. Ways to Save

Offer tailored tips and savings information to be more energy efficient

3. Solar and EV Experiences

Unlock the value of their investments through self serve tools and insights

4. Time of Use Transition

Enable customers to make an informed choice on their electric rate plans

Low Level Design Exploration

Device Level Disaggregation

We used a similar process across all our efforts. Taking device-level disaggregation as an example, I loosely explored different ideas fast and cheap to see what had potential; what could be built upon, and what wouldn't work

Prototypes for User Testing

We brought 2 different design directions into a round of user testing

Concept A

Concept B

Learnings from User Testing

💡

Extending on these home energy breakdown insights, customers also wanted personalized tips to be facilitated within this experience

🖱️

The information hierarchy and interactions needed simplification and rethink

🔋

The usage of the word 'estimate' while trying to explain how energy breakdowns work made some participants a little wary

Final Designs

Here’s the prototype of the final design

And here's a quick peek into different experience areas

Device-level Disaggregation

Ways to Save

Solar Web Experience

Solar Email Experiences

EV Experiences

Time of Use Transition

Results and Impact

The disaggregation experience helped us win multi-state bids across the east and the west coast in the US

The time of use experience has served 3M households successfully and the customer sentiment was extremely positive

The solar product offering had 3x engagement compared to our baselines

The tailored EV experiences has completely turned around customer sentiments and furthers utility goals of moving towards decarbonization