The opportunity
In New Zealand some of the operators of the various electricity grids around the country decided to move to a peak vs off peak model of pricing for electricity in order to ease the peak time power load on the national electricity grid.
Powershop NZ saw this as an opportunity to launch a new product in the market so they asked us to come up with a way to turn this opportunity into a new electricity retail product that would appeal to their customers.
My role
As the lead product designer on this project I worked closely with a senior member of the marketing design team at Powershop NZ throughout this project to ensure that we came up with the best solution for both their business and their customers. My role involved research, UX and UI design, stakeholder management and production design support during the implementation of the solution.
Step one - research
We began by running a series of stakeholder interviews with Powershop NZ staff members to get a solid understanding of the scope of the opportunity. We also ran a series of user interview sessions, visiting Powershop customers in their houses to talk about how and when they used their electricity.
Step two - initial concepts and implementation
From the research we undertook we were able to come up with ten different ideas for how Powershop could utilise this opportunity. We decided to do some rough wireframe sketches to illustrate these ideas and pitch them back to key stakeholders before asking them to vote on which they thought was the best option. Through this process we were able to distill these ideas down to three top contenders. We then ran some user testing sessions using prototypes to pick an eventual winner.
I then worked with the product delivery team to implement this solution which went to market with the name ‘Get Shifty’.
Step three - ongoing work
After the product was in market for a couple of months we ran a series of user testing sessions with Powershop NZ customers and also performed an analytics analysis to see how people’s electricity buying habits had changed. This enabled us to iterate and improve on what we delivered.
