With the foundations established and stakeholder alignment achieved, my team successfully implemented a consistent experience across our existing charger catalogue.
Now that the team lead has mapped their stakeholders and documented the change management processes, my role consisted of reviewing the quality of the work and validating the adherence to the design principles and definitions we set out before.
The key activities were:
Implementing a single design for welcome screens, meticulously translated for each country
Applying design tokens to screens that could be customised
Validating charger labelling and printed instructions, incorporating a new, more user-friendly connector numbering principle (a consequence of the reviewed customer-centric definitions)
Defining all details of the implementation on chargers
Medium term - Target behaviour and information architecture
Addressing the initial customer and business problem statements, I gave my team the task to create our own interaction standards rather than relying solely on available technology-led solutions.
From our research observations, we recognise that drivers adopt different mental models, such as 'digital-first' or 'petrol pump', resulting in different start charge sequences.
In parallel, the industry trend is to achieve a scenario where the charger automatically initiates charging upon identifying the car.
The direction I gave the team is to progressively streamline two interchangeable happy paths until there is only one step: plugging in the car. Whilst pursuing this objective, the systems will need to address all legacy requirements.
High-level happy paths
We thoroughly validated our working assumptions and user-flows by testing a prototype in bp's research lab. To do this we used the success criteria set up in the strategic plan, which we translated in UX metrics and research goals.
Defining success criteria and KPIs to inform user testing
Long term - Custom dispenser
Charging station dispensers sit at the intersection of numerous technical and usage constraints.
Recognising that the differentiation phase in the adoption curve would occur in a few years, and understanding that this is the minimum time needed to develop new hardware, I embarked on a mission to develop high-level charger concepts.
I synthesised all the knowledge we had acquired and broke down the EV charging process into the smallest steps a driver would need to complete a successful charge. This approach helped the team visualise all the spatial design requirements. For example, I considered actions as detailed as ‘opening the car door,’ since some layouts and designs had previously led to drivers hitting their car doors on the equipment, causing damage to both business and customer properties.
On the digital side, aiming for a seamless “plug and charge” experience, I explored ways to display information and feedback that were both appropriate and non-intrusive.
Examples of contextual displays by Free, Dyson and VanMoof
