Creating a frictionless flow for EV charger customers
Many of us are making changes to move towards a sustainable future. Lectrium is an innovative clean tech start-up that provides a fully managed service for people who own electric vehicles to receive a stress-free charger installation experience. We developed a digital user flow that helps homeowners find the best price and date for them.
The goal was to develop a web flow that meets current and prospective customers' goals, needs, and motivations as they pertain to an efficient green vehicle charging experience. We harnessed the power of the double diamond model in order to ensure that we governed the project in an orderly manner, led by sound iterative design thinking.
Existing customers were experiencing friction. Through a combination of having to complete some tasks on the site and others over the phone and email and the backed processes needing to take a couple of weeks, there were plenty of opportunities for a customer to drop off. This often occurred once staff had already spent up to 6 hours onboarding a customer. The client wanted to make sure that they qualify the lead and make a deposit or payment if they needed to buy an EV charger. We needed to increase conversation rates and secure an early ROI whilst creating an enjoyable customer experience.
We explored Lectrium’s existing operations and back-end processes to determine the existing customer flow. Stripped back, the process is relatively straightforward, but the current asynchronous process felt tangled and time-consuming.
Competitive analysis enabled industry standards and key features to be identified, including a preference for:
We then sent out a survey to target users to help inform our design. Key findings included:
“I want cost transparency”
We conducted 8 user interviews and affinity mapped the results to figure out key trends in their preferences and pain points. Similarly, it was trust in the company, cost transparency, accurate scheduling and a desire for a step-by-step process that were the main needs of the majority of our target audience.
I reached out to Lectrium customers for insights that could be gathered via interviews and surveys of people with experience in the existing processes. Of the 3 respondents, there was a consistent message about having an orderly and systematic process to follow and a desire to leave Lectrium to handle everything.
“I want a step-by-step breakdown on the installation process”
Once we had gathered enough research data we created an empathy map in order to establish common ground among team members and to understand and prioritize user needs. By organizing our user experience into who they are, what they are doing, and their senses during the process we could pull some of the user's key pains and gains.
From this we can better generate user personas. Our primary persona Angela and secondary persona George are based upon our affinity map as well as existing marketing metrics. Angela, who is planning on purchasing an EV or has one and is looking to set up at-home charging. She’s a young professional around the age 30 and cares about the environment and knows the importance of EV to lessen environmental impact. George is interested in EV. More of the middle age range who understands the popularity in EV, and cares about looking cool and keeping up with the trends, but wants to learn more about the outcomes and consequences.
These personas would enable us to visualise an individual navigating their way through our design and help us to empathise with the customers and spot potential points of friction early. However, they don’t tell us much about the specific job they want to do and outcome they want to have as a result of engaging with our design. As such, I created a Jobs-to-be-done, which is a technique that focuses on the customer needs and is based on the idea that whenever users ‘hire’ (or use) a product, they do it for a specific ‘job’ or outcome. Knowing what the outcome is, helped our team stay on the same page, stay focussed, and made sure we didn't stray from the task.
From our research data, I determined the main job for Lectrium customers is to be able to drive their EV with a consistent and reliable high level of charge.
The synthesized data alongside our personas and job-to-be-done, informed the problem at hand.
From this, the solution became:
“A digital user account creation and installation booking process will allow for a frictionless and intuitive experience for people who want to buy and install an EV charger in their homes”
To put initial ideas down I sketched the first low-fi iterations of the flow. Then, after going through these with the design team, a low-fi wireflow was generated in Figma. After feedback from a design studio session with the client, these designs were consolidated into mid-fi wireframes and prototyped ready for early user feedback to see how it was working.
After making changes based on user feedback we showed the mid-fi prototype to the client, who wished to make some changes and clarifications. This improved user flow gives our client the ability to perform their back-end work and also helps eliminate some confusion for our users. The user flow resulted in several additions to the design as we progressed into hi-fi wireframes.
We tested this iteration on 12 users and had a 91.7% success rate with an average time of 326.5 seconds to complete. However, there were still some jarring or confusing moments for some users. We had to understand what the users were saying about the current design.
“There were moments, when the email would have me log back in to review the summary, which could just be in the email like a phone bill or shopping receipt”.
Whilst keeping the user at the heart of my design decisions I had to remain cognisant of the client’s vision for the project. Gaining their feedback, I discovered that they wanted to remove the option of choice from the service plans but add choice selection to picking your installer. They also wanted to make more of a feature of having an order summary, and ensure that this was spelled out on the screen at each major endpoint in the progress in addition to the feedback that was already being provided by the progress bar.
This round of user testing, 38% of users said they were extremely straight forward and intuitive and 63% said they were very likely to follow this process though to completion With the high-fi design working well, I made the design mobile-responsive. I created a clickable dropdown module to house the progress bar from the top of the screen to give more real estate to the task, and employed a stacking approach to maximise screen layout for mobile devices. In mobile testing, the misclick rate was higher as well as the amount of time it took to complete the goal but our success rate was up 54% reaching a 100% success rate.
I would look to make iterations and develop the user interface all the while ensuring that we manage the expectations of the user, enabling them to read installer reviews and better view their progress. Looking further ahead, we can also see the potential for a redesign. If a charging as a service business model is launched, there may be reason to build a customer portal to enable return visits, manage multiple properties and make changes to your account.
My main discoveries around designing for this type of flow are:
I'd love to hear from you, whether you want to discuss an opportunity to work together, or you just fancy a chat and a brew.
Copyright © 2022 by Christie Rossiter.
