Energy IQ | LPG Bottle Ordering

Case study

Overview / Background

New Zealand relies on two types of gas for our household energy needs: natural gas and liquid petroleum gas (also known as LPG, or bottled gas), a cost-effective gas solution for households without access to natural gas. 

Ordering LPG bottle replacements is a repetitive process to keep customers carrying on with their everyday life, my challenge was to simplify and delight the purchasing experience established in the app, with the opportunity to closely match the app experience onto the web for feature parity. 

Length of Project: 2 weeks 

To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, any confidential information is omitted in this case study.
 

Understanding how it works

The first part of the project was to understand how LPG bottle replacement works. It is essential to understand the process in order to identify the friction users encounter on a regular basis.

 
 
 
 

Most households typically run 2x 45 kg bottles at a time so you have a backup when one runs empty offering an uninterrupted supply.

One bottle (primary) provides the main supply and the other (reserve) is a backup that provides extra gas when required.

When the primary bottle is empty, the automatic regulator changes over to the reserve bottle and the indicator turns red.

This presented an opportunity to delve deeper into the connectivity feature, enabling automatic updates and utilizing the data to enhance the ordering experience.

 
 
 

Based on the Power BI data, the most common LPG cylinder size for most residential users is the 45 kg gas bottles, and that usually last around 30 days for over 80% of the users.

 

Define objectives

 

I started the process with a collaborative group including the stakeholders to understand the business goals for this project. Scenarios and edge cases are also explored during the session.

Once I understand the process, my goal was to define what an ideal LPG bottle ordering experience should be, and turned them into “How Might We” Questions to Ideate on the Right Problems;

  • How might we make orders effortless?

  • How might we take advantage of the automatic regulator data that is designed to detect how much gas is left in the bottle?

  • How might we increase online ordering conversions while reducing the number of customer calls to the Call Centre?

  • How might we create an experience to keep customers carrying on with their everyday life and earn customer trust and retention?

  • How might we ensure the experience is consistent across web and mobile devices?

Wireframes

 

A critical part of the experience is that users have a clear goal in mind and just want to place the order with minimal hassles, to do so, the first step is to remove the friction from the existing journey where users have to enter delivery information each time they place an order.

By utilizing the user address and installation points data that we already have, we are able to autocomplete the form fields during the checkout process, this drove a much greater efficiency and users are able to complete the purchase in a matter of seconds.

The flow and design decisions were validated with the development team. Due to the limited resource and time constraints, instead of running the prototype through user testing sessions, we decided to perform a heuristic evaluation with users instead of user testings to make sure potential usability issues can be identified and resolved quickly and efficiently to meet the sprint goal target.

 
 

UX product spec documentation

To speed up the development productivity, UX specification is created to communicate design details, this includes interaction notes, guidelines to the transition, controls, bottom sheets and more. The documentation is designed to effectively support decision-making, streamlining the Designer to Developer Handoff.

 
 

Data visualisation

Most gas users typically run 2x 45kg bottles, a main, and a reserve to ensure a continuous supply. So when one bottle runs out, users typically replace it with a full one, while you use the gas from the other.

It makes life a lot easier if the customer can be reminded when a bottle should be replaced, as well as being able to monitor how much gas is remaining before placing an order.

By taking advantage of the automatic regulator detector data and connectivity, we designed a gas monitoring widget on the dashboard to allow users quick access to the gas information, notification messages were added to provide guidance to remind users when it’s time to order a bottle replacement.

 

Ordering made simple

The final LPG bottle ordering experience is intentionally simple, minimal and effortless. During the purchasing process, delivery information is automatically associated with the user’s address and installation point with the flexibility to switch sites should the user have multiple installation points from the same address.

I work closely with the Product Owner and Business Analyst to outline the Acceptance Criteria and capture UX features from an end-user perspective, including high-fidelity designs and detailed UX specifications to support and clarify design decisions. The story is discussed during the Refinement session to identify potential technical restraints, during the build process, I made sure a design QA between developer and testers is in place to make sure the intended design is accurately translated into the test environment before released to the production.

 
 

Positive results

The LPG ordering feature is well received and has had a positive impact on the LPG ordering experience.

For confidentiality reasons I have omitted reviewer's fullname.