A Powerful UX for Intangible Products
User Experience Design
Overview
People have a certain distance to charging products and often do not understand the functionality behind them. How could they? ...we can't even see electricity. And more importantly why should they?
Nevertheless, understanding of electricity will become more and more important in the future. Electric cars, photovoltaic systems and new technical products are taking us away from fossil fuels, but they also need to be supplied with electricity, which should come from renewable sources. This is problematic because the production of renewable energy fluctuates. Smart charging already offers the possibility to counteract fluctuations, but this requires a change in user behavior. But how to involve users if their knowledge about electricity is limited.
This project aims to investigate users' mental models of electricity and related topics such as sustainability and smart charging and how these can be influenced. The challenge is to identify user groups and to offer them a positive user experience for charging services, even though electricity is a low-involvement product.
My Role
As part of my master's thesis, I planned, conducted and evaluated the long-term study and the expert interviews. Furthermore, I developed a UX strategy for an app and created a high fidelity prototype. The process and the results were summarized in a thesis.
Highlights
- Interviews with 10 experts
- Long-term study with 27 users over 8 weeks
- UX strategy and design for an app prototype
Timeline
September 2022 - March 2023