Greenchoice

With the free Greenchoice app, you can take control of many energy-related matters yourself. Simple, always, and everywhere. This way, you gain control over your energy bill.

Design Techniques: Sketching, UX Design, UI Design, User Testing.

Problem

The Greenchoice app used to be handy for people who care about saving energy. But it turned into a big problem. Lots of users complained in the app store because it wasn't working well. The team who made it stopped fixing all the bugs. Greenchoice didn't have its own iOS and android developers, and not many clients were using the app regularly. Since more people were using phones to check their energy consumption, Greenchoice had to fix the app fast to make users happy again.

Idea

The product manager and I decided to make a progressive web app for Greenchoice's online platform, "Mijn Greenchoice." Why? Taking full control of design and development in-house eliminated the need to hire an additional team for the project. We focused on making it work well on phones first. Also, we wanted to help customers do things on their own using the website, so they wouldn't have to call Greenchoice for help.

Design

We added a bottom menu to the app to make it easier to move around. The primary focus was on providing detailed consumption insights, recognizing it as the most asked feature. We also made a special section called 'Self-Management' where users can control their settings all in one place.

You can find the design system here and all the different screens here

Prototype

Test

We tested our app with five people. I ran the tests, and my team watched and wrote down what happened. We asked the users to do different things to see if our app was easy to use. We mainly wanted to know if they could understand their energy consumption info and find the 'Self-Management' section easily.

Next steps

We could ship it, because:

People could find everything and they love the tabs of the app.
The insights in their energy consumption was gave them enough insights. Especially when they compared it with the current app.
If we asked the users to do something themselves: for example 'Add an extra adress.' they all immediately went to the 'Self-management' tab.

Overall we were very happy with the tests, but we got some great input to even improve the consumption insights. For example: As an user you can invest in a part of windmill from Greenchoice and you will get some money back every month. A lot of users invested a lot in these windmills, but didn't see it on the consumption page overview. For us it was pretty clear that we needed to add this one as soon as possible after the release.