Sprint 3
In a sense, Sprint 3 is a continuation of Sprint 2. Diving deeper into the target group’s needs and wants, getting to know it better, but also focusing on the whole experience journey and what insights this journey might bring.
Our goal for this sprint was to create concepts based on a co-creation session (with tiny-tidy office decision makers based on their energy consumption experience).
Brainstorm on steroids
Sprint 3 started with the realisation that after doing the interviews we still did not know enough about the TG’s needs, wants & values. Especially around the subject of their complete user journey. Now we only asked questions surrounding smart technology, privacy and sustainability. We concluded that there was a bigger picture: the fact that Eneco wants to change it’s image from a commodity business to an advisor role. Eneco is now in transit towards a company with ‘followers’. So we actually had to create a service that would fix the biggest pain point for the TG to create some kind of a, trust-based, relationship. And a relationship is based on transparency. To find out about this energy consumption experience, and their emotions with it, we thought it would be fun to set up a co-creation session. We started making a cultural probe together with trying to set up the session. The idea was that with the probe we would ‘warm them up’ for the session so that our respondents would have some basic information ready for us.
In the probe were methods and tasks like describing your energy consumption daily, weekly and monthly; listing sins and commandments of your energy company; describing your perfect employee, business-partner or advisor et cetera. With this information we would have some data that we could discuss during the actual session itself. We were planning on doing a brainstorm session and discuss why they answered the way they did. With the ‘actual’ journey and the sins/commandments method we would be able to find out the emotions and reasons behind the pain-points. With the ‘describe your…’ method the idea was to find out how the entrepreneurs wanted to be ‘helped’ with their problems. As an advisor (someone on the background outside of the company), employee (someone who listens to you) or as an, equal, partner (someone ‘inside’ the company).
Time is money
Just as in a previous sprint, contacting the target group proved to be a challenging task. And it was even more difficult this time, because not only did we need to find 5-7 CEO’s, interested in doing an interview, but also make sure that their schedules were aligned to have a joined co-creation session on a specific time, date and location. It took around a week to prepare the invitations, find and contact 60+ companies. And the result of all of this was insufficient to have a worthwhile co-creation session. Having 2 respondents was not representable enough to make decisions about the whole target group. Therefore, we had to rethink our approach and further steps. .
Regroup!
So after we experienced a hard time because of the lack of respondents for our session, we took a few days to regroup ourselves. The information we wanted to have with the session was based on their energy consumption experience and user journey. We had a meeting with Maartje and Ursula from Eneco to plan out the upcoming direction. We collected some brilliant data that was perfect for us. The data we actually wanted to have by having a co-creation session..
Making sense of it all
We analysed the data and sorted out a place to fit in as an interdisciplinary group. Our coach tipped us on cutting down the whole user journey to zoom in on a certain element, instead of the whole piece. We analysed the interview-data Eneco had very carefully, and brainstormed on that for two days to regroup. We decided to focus on the “usage” part of the customer journey.
Be like Bill
The connection Eneco has with their costumer on the business field right now, is usually once per month with a bill. How this bill is presented right now is very static and detailed. After we analysed the interviews we discovered that there are some friction points here. It was too hard for most of the entrepreneurs to find the information they wanted to look at. If you see how the consumers are having their bill presented by their Eneco Home account or Toon mobile account now, it shows how much potential the ‘normal’ bill actually has. We took the challenge to start focussing on the bill and how we can design a new experience with this part.
‘Out of the box’-thinking
We decided to do some individual research & concepting about the bill so that we could come up with fresh ideas. Antonia focused on game design and found some really interesting stuff around the subject of awards and the ‘call to action’ part of the bill. This stuff could be implemented in the insight-part of the bill. Thierry tried to find solutions in design, such as putting the name of the company on the same level as the logo of Eneco to create some sort of ‘equal’-feeling. Rokas and Laura were primarily researching and concepting into how to create more trust and transparency into options and design. Such as giving the user more power in shuffling it’s own options and the aspect of finding information with just one click of the button so that it does not feel like Eneco is trying to hide something in the tiny letters. All these concepts were combined and categorized so that we could make a small paper prototype to present.
Quick and Dirty: a paper prototype
We had a brainstorm session where we looked at our individual concept drafts and research about how you can present a bill and it’s information in the best way. After this session we wanted to put the new concept in a paper prototype.
What are all the possibilities? We thought about functions and usability, et cetera. We started with making a blank internet browser where we put our first functions on; customisable info-templates, infographic-wise stats etcetera. We drew them on papers and put them on the sheet to discuss about that. This is a very early stage of course but we started by making elements concrete. We presented this in our peer review and sprint review at Eneco for further discussions.
Eneco really liked the ideas and gave us some further information, feedback and input to build on for our next sprint.