Shell Energy Manager

Understand energy costs, increase operational efficiencies, and track emissions with integrated solutions and smart services that can help optimize your energy usage.

Client

Shell

Type

Product Design

Year

2021 - 2022

Project Overview

The problem

Auto sector customers face challenges in meeting sustainability goals and enabling EV sales due to limited visibility into energy infrastructure, lack of capital and resources, and need for comprehensive services and solutions for a sustainable transition to electric mobility.

The goal

To empower customers with the information they need to change the way they use energy and reduce their emissions.

Responsibilities

  • Conduct product discovery, including user research, interviews, stakeholder mapping, competitive audits, analysis, and synthesis.
  • Define personas, pain points, and value propositions to inform the ideation phase.
  • Ensure alignment with the DVF model (Desirability, Viability, & Feasibility) to determine if the product is worth building.
  • Facilitate multiple co-creation workshops with users and stakeholders.
  • Define user flows, scenarios, and workflows.
  • Create sketches, wireframes, prototypes, and mockups.
  • Conduct usability studies.
  • Ensure accessibility and brand alignment.

Section 2

Understanding the User

2.1 Interview Planning

What do we want to know?
Interview script template examples

2.2 Foundational Interviews

Stakeholders

Interviewed 3 stakeholders from different lines of business.

Customers

Interviewed 7 potential customers from our targeted user group.

Shell Energy Inside (SEI)

Interviewed 4 internal Shell users from customer support and sales.

SEI partners

Interviewed 3 people from third-party businesses who partnered with Shell to provide services for this product.

2.3 Pain Points

Targeted User Group

Wants to Better Understand Energy Usage

It’s a difficult, manual, and time-consuming process.

The Gap Between Management & Utilities

Users aren't shown how underperforming HVAC units negatively impact their electricity bills.

No Comprehensive View of All Facilities

It’s fragmented for large dealerships with locations across the country; they can’t see everything in one place.

How to Curb Energy Usage to Save Money

A lack of actionable insights makes it difficult for users to know what changes to make.

Help Transitioning to Electric Vehicles

Not understanding how to curb the cost of charging many more EVs on the dealership lot.

Measuring & Understanding Sustainability Efforts

Users are struggling to know what to track and how to track it.

Sustainability Goal Tracking

Users face pressure to become carbon neutral and need help tracking efforts towards that goal.

Sustainability Reporting

ESG & GRI sustainability reporting can be a complex process.

Shell’s Customer Support Team

Needing to Sign In to Each System Separately

When a customer calls, each system users pull their data from requires the customer to sign in.

Manually Reviewing Customers' Utility Bills

Needing to manually look at each bill for errors or high use.

Managing Current Customers' Portfolios

It’s difficult and messy to manage customers' facility locations, regions, and the equipment in each facility.

Generating Quarterly Performance Assessments (QPA)

Creating these reports is a frequent, manual, and time-consuming process.

Shell’s Sales Team

Can’t Adjust Customer Savings Estimates

Some prospective customers are not interested in all SEI offerings. Additionally, some may already have partial solutions (e.g., 20% of facilities already LED retrofitted).

Managing & Validating Prospective Portfolios

Importing, editing, and validating prospective customer data is currently manual and prone to errors.

Can’t Share Savings Estimates

Often, after presenting to prospective customers, they want to reference and share their savings estimates, but there’s currently no way to do that.

Need to Show How it Was Calculated & Assumptions Made

Prospective customers can’t see what assumptions were made or how their savings were calculated.

2.4 Personas

Problem statement

Adam, a facility manager at a large dealership, needs to better understand energy usage across all facilities because he wants to lower this usage in order to save money for his company.

Problem statement

Brenda, a facility & operations manager for a small dealership, needs to know when HVAC units are under performing in order to effectively maintain equipment and costly repairs.

Problem statement

Claire, a C-level executive at a small dealership, wants to lower operational costs across the board because of electric vehicle transition costs and the rising cost of electricity.

Problem statement

Daniel, a C-level executive at a large dealership, needs to understand how to collect and report on his sustainability efforts in order to effectively track alignment with his company’s carbon neutral goal and to appease shareholders.

Problem statement

Emily, an operations manager with Shell Energy Inside, needs a way to track and associate customer equipment because the current process is manual and not sustainable at the current rate.

Problem statement

Fiona, an account manager with Shell Energy Inside, needs to have the quarterly performance assessments automated in order to effectively manage customer relationships with her growing workload.

Problem statement

George, a sales person with Shell Energy Inside, needs to have more precise control over the savings calculator tool (Hotspots) because prospective customers are interested but have unique needs that the current tool doesn’t account for.

2.5 Research Progress Report Synthesis

Single page progress update for stakeholders

2.6 Stakeholder Map

Mapping product stakeholders

Section 3

Starting the Design

3.1 Sitemap

3.2 Paper Sketches

Energy management sketches
Reporting sketches

3.3 Lo-Fi Wireframes

Reporting Lo-Fi wireframes

3.4 Wireframes

Home page (left) and location detail page (right).
recommendations and sustainability score wireframes.
reporting wireframes

3.5 Workshop 1

workshop slides example
workshop 1 synthesis

3.6 Wireframe Updates

Home page

1

Added summary tab.

2

Incorporated recommendations as a map element.

3

Added emissions section.

4

Added region emissions trend indicator.

Efficiency visualization

1

Colored the scatterplot by price per kWh.

Energy use visualization

1

Added controls to change the year and an indicator for the number of locations being viewed.

2

Changed to a line chart instead of a bar chart.

3

Added indicator for major weather impact.

4

Added emissions section.

Recommendations page

1

Added load shape visualization.

2

Added cost & savings forecast visualization.

3

Added a history section.

3.7 Workshop 2

Competitive audit review

Conducted a competitive audit and grouped visualizations by type. Walked workshop participants through these visualizations and collected feedback.

First brainstorm session

Timeboxed sessions with participants, limiting the scope to keep ideas focused.

Second brainstorm session

Held with a different user group, first with stakeholders and second with the Shell Energy Inside (SEI) team.

workshop 1 & 2 synthesis

3.8 Workshop 3

Feature prioritization

Led participants through a series of dot voting exercises to help identify which elements to prioritize for MVP.

3.9 Hi-Fi Wireframes

Energy management hi-fi wireframe examples
Energy management hi-fi wireframe Mvp pages
reporting hi-fi wireframe examples

3.10 Prototype

user testing prototype example

3.11 Usability Study

usability study report summary
Usability study findings

Section 4

Refining the Design

4.1 Mockups for Targeted User Group

Home page aggregate view
Cost & Use explanation followed by top 10 bottom and 10 locations
Location energy use breakdown by sub-meter

4.2 Mockups for Shell's Sales Team

Admin tools for Shell’s Customer support team with sso across services
Tools for managing portfolios, user accounts, bills, and meters

4.3 Mockups for Shell's Sales Team

Hotspots sales tool for prospective customers
Average monthly bill breakdown to show potential savings
Savings calculation breakdown with refinement controls

4.4 Accessibility

WCAG AA Compliance

Colors, font sizes, and contrast ratios were considered in the user interface.

Tab Order

Tab order was annotated for the development team to optimize keyboard/switch navigation.

Alt Text

Alt text was provided for images and icons to convey content and context to visually impaired users.

Section 5

Going Forward

5.1 Takeaways

Impact

Shell Energy Manager became the most successful product within our hub (out of 5-7 total products). It accounted for the majority of the hub's funding and expanded beyond its initial scope.

What I learned

How proper discovery combined with the DVF model can validate a product idea and lead to more consistently successful products.

5.2 Next Steps

Continue Supporting Engineering Team

Provide guidance to developers as they build out more of the designs.

Finish Micro-Grid Wireframes

With the success of this product, more lines of business wanted to integrate with it.

Finish Mobile App Designs

The Shell Energy Manager Mobile App for Android and iOS.

Research ESG Reporting

Determine how to best integrate Shell Energy Manager reporting with ESG standards and framework.