Dash Energy
Energy broker network supported. Built by Schnieder Electric
Overview: Schneider Electric is multinational company that specializes in digital automation and energy management. It addresses homes, buildings, data centers, infrastructure and industries, by combining energy technologies, real-time automation, software, and services.
Design Problem: How might we help medium businesses optimize their energy costs with minimal effort while delivering maximum value to businesses, brokers, and suppliers?
Solution and Methods: Mach49 works with large corporations to create new ventures through a 3-month incubation process. As a product designer, my role was to help lead the client team through user archetypes (personas); testing storyboards, sketching, prototyping low-resolution wireframes, and usability testing.
Organization: Mach49 (Client: Schneider Electric (Dash Energy)
Role: Sr. UX/UI Designer (User Research, Information Architect, Interaction Designer, Prototyper, Interface Designer)
Team: 2 Designers, 1 Product Manager, 1 User Researcher (4 Client Founding Team members)
Timeline: 2020
High resolution designs developed after ~60 prototypes were tested
How might we help medium businesses optimize their energy costs with minimal effort while delivering maximum value to businesses, brokers, and suppliers?
The Challenge
How might we help medium businesses optimize their energy costs with minimal effort while delivering maximum value to businesses, brokers, and suppliers?
The core needs:Understand and refine the customer pains
Primary challenges in the energy industry?
What are the opportunities to solve shared challenges across segments?
Who are the primary users and what are their shared pains?
How can we find and test the value proposition quickly?
How can we receive seed funding from Venture Partners and convincingly depict the findings in 12 weeks?
Goals
Socialize and synthesize findings between internal team and external funding partners
Receiving seed funding in 12 weeks
Train our incubator founding team members on agile product methods
Product and Design Process
Design Research
Find the Pain: the team conducted 278 customer interviews in three different forms: pain point, storyboard, and wireframe + hi-res prototype interviews. All interviews were created to answer questions that helped us understand the needs in the energy industry.
Multiple personas and user journeys were created including energy brokers, medium businesses, and energy suppliers.
Interviewees step through three divergent scenarios and give their feedback on the concepts.
Product Strategy & Insights
Suppliers and medium businesses were looking for a way to find brokers that were verified. This meant trust was key and the current methods of searching for brokers didn’t provide ways to know your candidates were trustworthy. Then came the question: how might we create a product that enhances credibility and background info for brokers?
Many brokers were hired from word of mouth or personal recommendations because they didn’t trust the small amount of info they were receiving from the standard candidate profile.
With our learnings, we knew that we had to focus on the following needs:
Enhance Broker productivity
Deliver Volume to Suppliers
Empower Businesses
Enable simple renewable buying
Create trusted ecosystem of the future.
One of my favorite moments from this project was the design of an information diagram that depicted key stakeholders and their relationships and aligned problems. This was a key moment that brought alignment to the team. I learned that a simple diagram can help orient a cross-functional team toward a solution in a way that should not be underestimated.
Interaction Design
Test the with low resolution wireframes:
Interviewees interacted with three divergent prototypes and gave their feedback on the experience. This part of the process involved low-fidelity wireframes. Wireframes were showcased in Invision to be presented as clickable prototypes.
After testing various features of a prospective hiring platform, the most successful features were constructed into a ‘kitchen sink’ wireframe that encompassed everything that would be in the MVP. They were effective enough for us to get pilot subscribers.
Visual Design
I led a visual strategy followed by a design system that I worked on with a UX/UI designer. The goal was to create a design system that was multi-platform, and multi-language. It included color, typography, iconography, and components. The design system was implemented in both 2D and 3D, as it needed to work across iOS, Android and Unity.
Outcomes
After hundreds on customer interviews and dozens of iterations, in early 2020, I designed a pitch for the team to present to the venture board within Schneider Electric and the product received $1.4 million in seed funding.
Successfully training the founders in wireframing and agile product testing: Dash Energy was spun out of the larger corporation and testing continued with pilot customers. The company raised a further $2 millionand dialed in on compelling needs, becoming an industry leader, make deal flow easier for brokers.
In July of 2023, energy pricing volatility and related uncertainty initiated a market-wide drought of new procurement contracts, and Dash's funding was not renewed.
“What [is] the timeframe for you guys to have the software ready because I’m ready to switch…I’m getting more interested by the hour and switching over to something like what you’ve got…”
- Energy Broker
“It’s sort of the age-old analogy of teaching a man to fish…Mach49 really taught us how to test and prototype new ventures instead of doing it for us.”
-CEO, Dash Energy
