The team had an engaged group of early adopters who were using the beta app and providing lots of useful feedback. We identified the main issue being understanding how the Homely system works and how to get the most out of it.
Research taught us that Heat-pumps and the Homely service work significantly differently to traditional boilers. They run for longer, they heat slower and turn on and off at unexpected times. The biggest challenge was to help users build trust with the system, and teach them to trust it to do all the work for them. This required delivering complex information in manageable chunks, at the right time.
We were lucky to be working with an existing user base of early adopters, however they were ‘power users’ and all had existing knowledge of how heat-pumps work. I wanted to test with a broader group with varied levels of understanding and abilities to ensure we were accessible and prepared for new customers with no understanding of heat-pumps.
With a real deadline and product launch approaching I suggested we engaged with a testing agency to help us with facilitation and recruitment for a qualitative, observed testing. I worked with SimpleUsability (now CDS) to recruit a broad spectrum of test candidates. Together we worked on a testing script, and I created high fidelity prototypes as testing materials. Further to this we created a questionnaire to understand the general comprehension on how heat-pumps work.
Testing proved that creating a heating schedule was challenging to new users. To get the best out of the system and to explain how to do this simply, I designed a schedule wizard that creates a schedule based on their behaviour, removing the need to over explain and allow them to put trust in the system.
For certain hardware maintenance issues we identified a need for self help within the app. One being changing the batteries of ‘The Node’. Working with the support team I designed a self help flow with supporting videos to address this, significantly reducing the pressure on the team.
The new version of the app was well received by the existing user base, and there was a reduction in the need for customer support meaning the app was filling in knowledge gaps and supporting users as we intended.
"Andy helped us redesign our whole app, taking it from an MVP to something much more useable. We have some quite complex customer interactions within the app but Andy got to grips with these really quickly to make it much easier for the user to understand from the start."
Sustainability business leader, Evergreen Energy
UX Design
Product design
Prototyping
Animation
User research
Design leadership
Figma
Adobe Creative suite
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Cinema 4D
