British Gas.
A service design mindset - using tools and techniques like user interviews, design sprints, future state mapping, and service blueprints to focus on and champion customer needs and pain points within the business.
Service DesignUser testingDesign systemOur approach
A long term relationship we assisted British Gas with multiple projects over a 2 year engagement joining their well established and impressive UX community. During this engagement the team helped to grow and deliver British Gas Design System ‘Nucleus’ whilst delivering features to the 12m customers.
Using an evidence-based approach to design, powered by British Gas' onsite testing lab. The result of was simple - the product is driven by the customers and their needs. Collaboratively working with over 20 product teams across digital self-service and sales, organised around the key jobs the customer needs to get done.
Our toolkit
Design Systems.
Establishing a design system is tough, made even harder in a business the size of Centrica. We championed and rolled up our sleeves to assist the delivery of a scalable design system.
Guilds.
In order to create cohesion and reduce waste as Lead Product Designer Tom was challenged to bring together the sales Product teams to share knowledge, overlaps and learnings quicker than ever before.
User testing.
As part of the well established community at British Gas we had access to their in-house lab for user testing regularly. Not content with that we wanted to push further and engaged with the Research Institute for Disabled Consumers (RiDC) to test with vulnerable users.
A deep dive.
Project – Pay an invoice
Role – Lead Product Designer
January 2019
Opportunity
Currently, 150K customers call the contact centre per year to pay an invoice. Based on the current adoption rate of our pay online service, that could amount to an annual cost saving of £750K.
Impact
Since launch we have taken in excess of 50K (March 2020) invoices equating to £250k additional savings
Discovery
With our product team tasked with delivering a completely new feature to the British Gas customers we had nearly no quantitative data besides call volumes. Using the British Gas in house lab we could quickly and effectively gain qual data to establish users mental models through card sorts and structured interview techniques.
We set about creating current and future state blueprints from
call listening and interviews to identify pain points and opportunities.
Pay an invoice was identified as a key pain point
Concepts
We turned our future state blue print into journeys to tackle paying an invoice online, using sketch and British Gas pattern library we quickly iterated our concepts into full customer journeys ready for testing.
To ensure our customers could find their invoices we needed to also tackle the tricky world of the users account and collaborate with the accounts team. We established a new component ns-tabs in order to allow users to have a complete overview of their bills in one place.
Qualitative User Research
With our product team tasked with delivering a completely new feature to the British Gas customers we were relying heavily on call volumes and insights from call centre feedback. We needed to get to the customer, queue the British Gas in house lab where we could quickly and effectively gain qual data to establish users mental models through card sorts and structured interview techniques and prototypes.
Once identified the users needs it we moved onto creating fully working prototypes using inVision for customers to test for us. This was a unique experience to most teams as the whole product team was involved in moderating and observing the session, truly integrating all members of the team into the user-centric thinking.
Testing how users want to access their bills and invoices
The whole team are part of the testing process
Conclusion & Impact - estimated £250k additional savings
Since launch we have taken in excess of 50K (March 2020) invoices equating to £250k additional savings. This project was a huge success and showed the value of identifying customer needs and pain points to discover value and create impact.