B2B2C solution for monitoring energy consumption leveraging smart meters
Research, design and development
In an enterprise software company, having to work on a B2B2C project was a rarity. For a designer, this meant researching not only our customer’s end users, but also the end users of their customers. This was extremely exciting. I was heavily involved in the complete process of — multiple rounds of research, designing the system its development.
Challenge
Neither our customer, nor their customer were aware or open to a design driven approach and the need to involve their respective end users in the project.
It was difficult to reach the users of the end customer.
B2B2C being a new business model, the entire focus was on commercialisation and technical feasibility of IoT data etc. Design and user research was extremely low on everyone’s priority.
Design decisions
I requested (negotiated) the key stakeholder to invite two users from our end customer’s company for just 20 minutes with the promise to let them leave if the stakeholder did not see value in their participation.
Instead of a typical demo being given to the end user’s I requested the management to allow the end users to use the system to perform their daily tasks and let us know their opinions. The management and other stakeholders were allowed to sit along with the end users and observe. To their surprise, they found this approach extremely valuable.
Present the key learning received by the team directly from the users to the entire set of stakeholders. The consequences of the feedback — e.g. prioritisation on user stories and backlog items for development.
Impact
Our customers and theirs were, a converted group of stakeholders. They highly appreciated the design driven approach and the need to involve their end users.
The end users were motivated to participate in multiple follow up validation sessions with the team.
We were able to include our development team members in follow up customer sessions to directly interact with the end users.
