The opportunity
In 2018 I was working for Flux Federation who provides the digital platform that Powershop NZ, UK and Australia use to retail power to their customers. The UK and Australia branches needed to start supplying natural gas to their customers to ensure they remained competitive in the market. At the time the Powershop platform only supported the sale of electricity so we had to design a way to add the ability for those markets to sell gas.
My role
As a senior product designer at Flux my role involved both research (user interviews and testing) and design (wireframes and prototypes through to finished UI design). I also needed to work closely with stakeholders from the UK and Australia markets to ensure we delivered the optimal solution for each market.
Step one - research
In order to understand more about how Powershop users wanted to be able to purchase their gas alongside electricity we began by running a series of remote user interviews with current Powershop customers in the UK and Australia. We also interviewed stakeholders from Powershop UK and Australia to understand more about how it should work from a power retailer point of view.
Step two - initial concepts and implementation
After the initial round of user interviews myself and some of my colleagues worked on several sets of wireframes illustrating a few different options on how to tackle the problem. We then presented these back to key stakeholders for feedback and from that were able to distill the ideas down to two possible options. From there we ran a series of user testing sessions using prototypes made from the wireframes. This enabled us to decide which solution would work best for both markets. Myself and my colleagues then moved to production support mode where we assisted our developers in implementing the solution.
Step three - ongoing work
After the initial implementation of the solution had been live for a few months I flew to Melbourne where I ran some user testing sessions. We engaged the help of a user research agency to do the same thing in the UK market. From this we were able to make several improvements to the solution we had delivered.