Engie - Service Design

Creation of a charging station sharing service within the brand ecosystem

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Context & Goals

Everything began with the last competition that we had at school for the end of our Master Degree. ECV Digital being a digital school and not only a design school we formed teams composed by people from different expertise of the 4 different master classes : Developer, Marketing, Web Design & User Experience. We knew that we would work for Engie and had to choose between 2 subjects without really knowing what was behind : Low cost or Mobility. We chose Mobility and the brief was “How to provide an unforgettable digital experience to Internet users in a situation of electric mobility?” with 2 outlined goals :

Create an ideal digital experience around electric mobility
Selling our offers to electric vehicle owners

What we heard during the briefing was “Make us a WOW effect experience to sell electric contract for people who own an electric car”. So at this point, we weren’t in agreement with the stated problematic and we had to reframe it. Firstly we had to understand the context and read between the lines. Engie sold only a few contracts and charging stations for electric cars (less than 10), their lowest price for a charging station is onerous (999€), electric cars are still a niche market in France and people are afraid of their range and their charging time. The ecosystem of electric cars is hard to understand, you need to have a certain level of expertise before having the minimum understanding to use it and to acquire the right materials. And the last point was a very poorly designed website and journeys, between all the electric car offer you could loop infinitely between the pages searching for an information and never getting it ! The last thing that we saw was that Engie was very late on this market and EDF was already implanted in every metropolis and highway in France with its brand Sodetrel (renamed as Izivia since then and extended to Europe).

Team & Stakeholders

2 UX Designers
1 UI Designer
1 Webmarketing
1 Developer

Timing

2 weeks competition

Responsabilities

Team lead / Sprint master
Information Architechture
Ergonomy
Experience design
Service design
Strategy design
Recommendations
Speaker

Problematic & Challenges

Because we had only 2 weeks to answer the brief, we tried to approach as much as possible to the design sprint method using design thinking. Firstly, we had to reframe the problematic to be business oriented, using every resource of our team and creating real value for Engie by our answer. We took the first day of this two weeks challenge to understand what Engie communicate to us, to understand the context and to reproblematize by discussing and by the 5 whys exercise to get the following problematic “How to boost the acquisition of Engie’s electric mobility services?” At this point we had the problematic but no relevant data (you don’t think that Engie would give any relevant data to students), so we spent a few days doing some research on the internet, asking in our entourage and in the neighborhood. We had to better understand the context, the business, the ecosystem, the consumption trends and if possible the users before making any ideation or any decisions. When each research were done, we gathered all the learnings in documents for each person of the project or off project would be aligned in information. After the understanding comes the ideation. We used many ideation methods but mainly a mix of Crazy 8 and brainwriting, each person has a paper with a grid of 8 and has 1 minutes to describe or draw an idea, when the minute passes each person give the paper to their neighbor and has 1 minute to put a new idea of to iterate on others. This technique gives the opportunity to reach a collective creativity, avoid the lack of idea after the 4th one and avoid the idea belongings. To converge on problematics and ideas we used the dot voting method. We didn’t want to be extra rigid and to kill the natural creativity, so we took all the ideas and thoughts that popped and were off context, and put them on the wall into a “car park”. We took afterward the time each day to discuss these subjects. On this project, the main challenge was the lack of time and of data that we often suffer with as students. The other challenge was the emotional fatigue that we were facing with the intense year and competition that we had.

Timeline

W1_Research&Definition
- Consumption patterns
- Brand personnality
- Personas
- Actual journeys on the website
- Problematic redefined
W2_Ideation&Production
- Recommendations
- Website redesign
- Chatbot based on website journey
- New offer for the charging station
- Charging point charing service / Mobile App
- Creative communication campagn

Solutions

Tying to have fun as much as we could

As it was our last moment as students and working together before everyone get back to his job, we enjoyed the moment as a human experience. Each morning, one of us brought some pastries from the bakery, we ate each lunch together and sometimes with other teams, and loved getting every other team out of nerves with our Nerf Guns. We also had fun delivering this solutions as we took advantage of being in a school competition to be bold and creative.

A lifted website (and a chatbot)

The first obvious solution was for us to lift the website with a new, sober and modern design but more importantly, clear information architecture and journeys, so users could have an easy experience on their websites. To add meaning to their experiences, we design content and put related content that already existent at some points of the journey, so they can leverage their skills and understanding of electric mobility. We thought that if consumers had a better knowledge of the ecosystem and the state financial support, it would relieve some fears. The other big matter of the website was to get easy access of content about green electricity being clear and transparent. For the “wow effect” we built a chatbot by converting the experience of the website as a conversational experience. To do that we used the designed arborescence and journeys as starting points reworking them as a discussion between two people to design a discussion tree that we implemented onto a Chatbot builder and compiled as a Messenger Bot.

Rethinking the offers

The biggest pain point of Engie’s business was the lack of sales of their charging station (begin’s at 999€), and for us it was clearly due to the lack of alignment of Engie and nowadays consumption behaviour. We counselled them to change the business model of the charging stations and selling them as services with a location model. This way, the consumer could spread out the cost and acquiring it with less reflection or friction, and potentially updating their equipment if needed or wanted.

Our “one more thing” - The car charging station sharing service

And to go further again, we chose to assume the greatest pain points of the electric car, their autonomy and charging time, and make it a strength. France is worldly known of its metropolis but also for its beautiful countryside rich in the landscape and culture. We observed thought the last decade that the local made and slow life was the trends. For us, this charging time could be an opportunity to take the time, far from the stress of the big cities, the time to discover again the countryside and its benefits, its organic food, its vineyard and its farms. We designed Elec’Share, in accordance with their branding and other services (Elec’Car, Elec’Charge), the first peer to peer charging points sharing service that allow electric car drivers to charge their car at a private home. The service is not designed for urban citizens but for the suburbs and countryside people that will have a parking spot. We saw it as an opportunity to amortize the purchase of the charging and for AirBnB users. As the metropolis and highways are already equipped with charging points delivered by companies, the strategy of this service creation is to mesh the countryside that is not equipped at all, creating a new excitement for the rural side by making it more accessible and open the electric car market to the countryside.

And the cherry on top of that - The communication campaign

We worked on 2 creative ideas to support Elec’Share and Engie as a green energy provider. The first one, for Elec’Share, was to the promise of a tour of France thanks to this new service, the second, a programmatic campaign on the internet and screen advertisement panel in the street based on the weather to display the amount of electricity produced with the sun, in the case of a sunny day, by the wind on a windy day and in the see of a rainy day, to raise awareness of how green electricity is generated.

Results

After a presentation of 10 minutes and afternoon of waiting, occupied by Nintendo Switch tournaments, we finally had the results. We ended up 2nd of our brief, and the solution has been unanimously approved spite the reinterpretation of the brief. Few weeks later, I’ve been contacted to continue the project as Freelance at Engie Digital but I could bring only one teammate in the adventure.

Delivrables

Workshops
Design Sprint
Personas
Consumer journey map
Architechture d’information
Priority Guides
Wireframes
Mockups
Interactive Prototype
User tests
Design System
Recommandations
Design Backlog