In an effort to provide SoCalGas customers with a better tool to manage their residential and business utility accounts, a team was assigned to design a mobile app that would allow users to track usage, make payments and manage alerts on their mobile devices.
My Role
• Demonstrate look and feel of the proposed application
• Synthesize the mobile UI based on pre-existing tables and graphs from B2B website
• Produce visual design, layout and graphic icons for the interface
The Problem
Functionality wasn’t defined, we had no information about the targeted users and no design brief.
The Approach
I worked with the team to Identify the design challenge and took a User Centered Design approach to come up with a useful solution. To better understand the Pains, Needs and Wants of customers we formulated a list of questions to find out about the users who the app was targeted to and the tasks they most needed to accomplish
We discovered that within the group of users using mobile technology there were the ‘environmentalists’ who are conscious about how their emissions contribute to the environment. This allowed us to think of features to make the app more appealing to them, like adding a component that would calculate their carbon footprint.
The Result
In a few days we were able to:
• Identify the most important tasks users needed to complete on the go
• Documented components and functional specification
• Provide mockups as a visual reference of the components in iOS
