ilek
User Research and Design Ops for a renewable energy provider
6 min read
Overview
- ilek
a sustainable energy provider
- 2023-2024
5 months
- Dovetail, Typeform, Notion
- Figma & Miro
- Mixpanel, Hotjar
- Myself
UX Researcher / Design Ops - Design team
a Lead + 2 Product designers - Product team
+ Dev, Data, Marketing teams
- Introducing UXR processes & tools to a junior team
- Working fast pace with limited Data
- Making the design ops more mature
- Dovetail + associated processes up and running
- Full app mapping + review
- Usability, accessibility fixes
Project summary
iek is a French energy company that supplies renewable electricity and gas to individual customers and SMEs. Its primary offices are situated in Toulouse, with the majority of ilek's employees working remotely.
The Product team concentrated on the following products:
- A web app designed for customers, allowing them to manage their accounts from any device (to access their contracts, track energy consumption, access bills and documents, etc.).
- ilek's website (as depicted) and dedicated landing pages (LPs).
- The subscription funnel for acquiring new customers.
- An internal CRM and Back Office solution for the Customer Support and Sales teams.
The objective was to ensure the company's growth by optimising the funnel and landing pages, but also to provide the best possible experience for users, empowering customers to be more autonomous, and employees to be more efficient.
Within this overarching goal, my role was to integrate User Research practices into ilek's product development process, enhance design and UXR operations, and improve the overall customer experience by addressing usability and accessibility issues within the company's applications.
My role
Senior UX Researcher / Design Ops
As a senior member of the team, my primary responsibility was to embed user research practices within a product team consisting of 15-20 members organized into four squads, in collaboration with the development team. This involved implementing 'Dovetail' as our research repository, crafting personas for the company's main product, outlining a UXR plan for 2024, evaluating the alignment of ilek products with key customer needs, and providing support for design initiatives.
The problem
Lack of User research initiatives and understanding
- Lack of established user research practices within the organisation
- Limited access to (or efficient use of) data for conducting comprehensive research
- Absence of UXR tools and limited understanding of UXR potential within a 'junior' Product Team
There was no dedicated UXR role before my arrival on the team. Consequently, there were no established habits or processes for integrating insights from UXR initiatives into the working process.
Another issue was the team's lack of understanding about the available data and how to effectively leverage it to gain insights into our users, their expectations, and pain points. There was also essential data about our user base that was missing (e.g. customers age range and other basic demographics), as well as proper ways to measure our impact.
Any previous research, whether qualitative or quantitative, was stored in files or folders with limited access and often forgotten once the focus went on a new issue.
Design
- Inconsistent design processes across teams, and uneven design toolkit
- Lack of end-to-end vision for the product and user journeys
- Usability and accessibility issues within the company's applications The web app had numerous issues and design debts. Additionally, it fell slightly below the standard expected in the utility industry in France.
The various squads used to work following their own processes and conventions. Designs were created by different designers, whether employees or contractors, each using their own nomenclature or statuses in their specifications. Overall, there was a lack of consistency in how the design was delivered and perceived by the rest of the team.
The maturity of components within the design system and their documentation levels were also quite inconsistent.
There was no documentation providing a comprehensive view of the experience, no end-to-end mapping of the system, nor an understanding of how the service and touch points worked together.
The solution
Team and Ways of working
Discovery / Research
Solution / my contributions
Establishing User Research
- Collaborated closely with the design and product teams to integrate UXR practices into their workflows and improve design operations
- Conducted training sessions and created resources on UXR best practices and tool usage to educate and onboard the Product team
- Established processes for tracking research spending, activating rewards, and informing customer support teams
- Contributed to the design system in Figma, mapped the entire website, and proposed quick wins for usability and accessibility improvements
- working process
- squads (growth dual track looking after the lp and funnel)
- customer (looking after the customer area + optimisation to make them more autonomous)
- Conducted interviews with product managers to understand their needs and expectations
- Established Dovetail as the research repository, configured templates, and evangelised its usage
- Conducted quantitative and qualitative research to create personas for ilek's main products
- Developed a framework for rewarding customers participating in user research initiatives
- Created a comprehensive UXR plan for 2024, including research types, training needs, and communication plans
- Evaluated the coverage of customer needs by ilek products and proposed enhancements
- I introduced Dovetail as our research repository and provided training to the team on how to use it effectively, highlighting its benefits.
- I conducted interviews with product managers to understand their needs and expectations.
- I set up Dovetail as the central repository for research, configuring templates, tags, and fields, as well as the People database, and promoted its adoption across the team.
- Development personas through quantitative and qualitative research findings
- A summary outlining key goals and objectives, demographics, why they were with ilek, their interests or disinterests in specific ilek products or services.
- A visual support of the persona (Figma) for easier sharing or printing
- Key highlights extracted from various interviews that contributed to the development of this persona, along with the rationale behind identifying their goals.
- Developed a framework for rewarding customers participating in user research initiatives
- Planned our UXR strategy for 2024
- Continuous Research: Conducting Competitor analysis, building Experience maps and Service Design blueprint, refining Personas and integrating them in our workflows, user testing our live products, and leveraging negative CSAT or reviews to gather insights
- UXR support for our Impact teams: Organising focus groups and conducting quantitative/qualitative research for each squad.
- Tailored trainings sessions for the Product team and other departments
- Communication and advocacy of UXR processes, tools,and the dissemination of results, insights, and impact.
Before my involvement, the Persona project had been initiated by one of the designers. She had gathered quantitative data regarding our customers' demographics, reasons for subscribing to ilek, their energy consumption tracking habits, and reasons for logging into their customer space. Additionally, she initiated a workshop for the qualitative part of the study.
I then took over the project and developed an interview guide, recruited participants, and conducted all the interviews (implementing a template for interview tracking and shadowing). Simultaneously, I set up Dovetail to directly integrate this work into our central UXR repository.
Following this, I tagged all interviews highlights and analysed the results so I could extract key (and actionable) insights for our team.
Each persona had a dedicated page including
Considering our aim to boost UXR initiatives, we wanted to incentivise customers engaging in more demanding activities such as lengthy interviews or surveys. Working closely with our CPO and other internal stakeholders, I refined our needs and developed a framework enabling the Product team to allocate 'points' to participating customers.
I collaborated with the customer service team ensured minimal disruption to their operations, and with the billing PM to integrate a system to track points awarded to clients as UXR rewards.
Including initiatives such as:
Supporting Design initiatives
- Contributed to the design system in Figma
- Proposed a template and conducted product reviews
- Proposed quick wins for usability and accessibility improvements on key customer account pages + some more advanced propositions
- Mapped the entire web app to analyse the flows and ensure consistency and clarity in customer journeys
Figma and the Design System were a mess... The designers had started working on it (establishing Tokens for Foundations, organising/fixing/aligning components)). I supported them helping with cleaning and documentation efforts.
I proposed a Notion template/database to ensure that the reviews we conducted on the Customer portal and other products were consistently captured and integrated into the overall process.
Each entry was an issue identified during the review. They were linked to a Product/Journey (and a page or element if applicable), categorised (e.g. accessibility, visual design, etc.) and ranked based on their criticality. I added a status and links to monitor these issues and integrate them with other parts of the workflow (such as Initiatives, Problems/Opportunities, User Stories, etc.).
Then, I provided detailed descriptions of the issues and proposed two solutions for the majority of them: a quick fix (high impact, low effort) and a more advanced solution (not constrained by timelines or other limitations). This was then reused and refined in User Stories when the issue was prioritised.
Constraints and challenges
- Limited access to comprehensive data for conducting user research
- Educating and onboarding a junior team on UXR processes and tools
- Balancing the pace of work with the need for thorough research and design improvements
Results
- Established Dovetail and associated processes within ilek
- Comprehensive mapping and review of the ilek webapp, leading to identified usability and accessibility fixes
- Improved collaboration and alignment across design and product teams
Learnings
- There is always data available about your users; you can rely on the knowledge of your customer support team or actively engage with your Data team.
- Balancing speed and thoroughness can be challenging when conducting user research or implementing design improvements.
- Establishing clear processes and communication channels within cross-functional teams is invaluable. This fosters better understanding and appreciation of your discipline and its impact.
- Continuous education and training on User Experience Research (UXR) practices and tools are essential, particularly for junior team members.