Smart City and Lean UX: Encouraging energy savings
What is Smart City?
Smart Cities are urban centers that have been incorporating technologies and IT solutions to integrate and optimize municipal operations, reducing costs and improving the quality of life of its inhabitants.
A city that reaches this level, therefore, is not only connected, but a living and sustainable region that can use intelligence in favor of the administration and management of resources, and ensure more safety and convenience in the use of roads and other public facilities.

Objective of the work
The objective of this work was to have an innovative idea, which was related to the Smart City theme and connect it with a Spanish bank and then this idea would be launched to the market through a Landing Page and from metrics and KPIs we would measure the success of this digital product.
Time to do the work
To do the whole process of the work, from the initial conception of the ideal to the development of the product and analysis of the metrics we had the time of a sprint, or two weeks.

Methodology
For the development of the project I used the Lean UX methodology.
The Lean methodology consists of creating products focused on users, decreasing their risk and accelerating the production process. Lean UX is an innovative method that improves the user experience and guarantees the success of your website.
The Lean methodology is based on the feedback cycle: build — measure — learn.

Process of work
Why?
With respect to the energy consumption of Spanish families, since the 1990s and until relatively recently, the energy consumption of Spanish households has evolved above population growth, at a rate even 3 times higher. This has been mainly due to the increase in domestic equipment.
An average household in Spain consumes about 4,000 kWh of electricity per year. In the case of a household that had all the services and equipment for electricity supply.
So my project would help to promote energy saving, in addition the user could become aware of the energy consumption of the region in which he lives and encourage his neighbors also save more. Generating an idea related to Smart Cities
Benchmarking
After finding out a little more about energy consumption in Spain, I started researching applications in the world that aimed to encourage energy savings in order to generate ideas for functionalities:

Conclusion Benchmarking
- The applications in question are aimed more at the consumption of light in the consumer’s own home, that is, most of the applications do not offer information about the consumption of their neighborhood, or region where it is located;
- An important issue for energy savings is how much a home’s electrical appliances spend, which is important information for avoiding the use of energy-intensive appliances.
- These applications rely on the partnership of energy companies and banks.
Protopersona
After having already defined a theme and understand a little more about digital products in this category, it was time to define the ideal user.
Macarena is a 46-year-old woman with a family responsible for paying her household bills and her biggest frustration is that the electricity bill is coming very expensive, so she wants to save energy and also save money.

Proto User Journey Map
In her journey Macarena is always nervous because her light bill comes very expensive and in the end, even saving the bill remains high and she does not know why.

Assumptions
Bearing in mind the main user pains and important functionalities that could exist in the product, I began to generate assumptions to understand what ideas I could get for the solution and take into account how to relate them to the bank.

So the next step was to prioritize the ideas of the most risky and unknown to the least risky and known, in fact, I chose to earn an extra return on their savings account, which people want to know the consumption of the neighborhood, district and province, and make a calculation of how much they spend the electrical appliances in their home.

Hypothesis Statement
To justify the ideas I also made statements of hypothesis which are:
- [We believe that] with an app that shows the consumption of the neighborhood in which the user is, the city and province [we will get] alert the user of the importance of saving energy.
- [We believe that] with an app that motivates the user to save energy by giving him an extra return on his savings account [we will get] more records in the Bank involved.
- [We believe that] with an app that shows the calculation of how much you spend on each electrical appliance [we will get] more users that aren’t necessarily bank customers.
User Stories
Having the functionalities already defined it was time to make the user stories. That’s a concise description of a user requirement of the product (that is, a “requirement”) from the user’s point of view. User Story seeks to describe this need in a simple and lightweight way.
1. As a bank user, I want to access the average consumption of my neighbourhood so that I can earn extra income in my savings account.
1.1. As a user I want to register in the application with my bank savings account so that I can earn profit.
1.2. As a user I want to know how much I earned in profitability in the month I have saved more.
1.3. As a new user, I want to access the average consumption of my neighbourhood, district and province in order to be motivated to save more energy.
2. I as the user, want to be able to access this information without necessarily being a client of the bank.
2.1. I as a new user want to make a calculation of how much I spend on each device to reduce energy consumption.
2.2. As a user I want a form in which I can register the devices I use at home.
2.3 As a user I want a form where I can put the time of use of the device
Develop
Finished this part began the creation phase, here are a moodboard that I have been inspired to make the application and the Landing Page on a visual level.


Wireframes


Visual Identity
To make the prototype I was inspired by the references already shown and also on the BBVA Bank website, I chose this bank to relate to the application, because besides being one of the largest banks in Spain, I believe that the target audience is or even, in other words, people responsible for paying the bills and who want to save money for the future.
I chose the name Lightly, because it makes reference to economy of energy, besides being a short and simple name, I also used one of the main colors of BBVA Bank.

Prototype app


Landing Page
to see the site in operation access: https://lightly.store/

KPIs
After the Landing page was launched in the air, the KPIs had to be defined.
KPI comes from the English acronym for Key Performance Indicator, that is, Key Performance Indicator. It is a way of measuring whether an action or set of initiatives is effectively meeting the objectives proposed by the organization.
So my KPIs were:
- Get a satisfactory number of users who access the site and 30% of scroll to the “Unete” session (be part of it) to understand if the user was interested in the idea.
- Getting Leads: 15 entries on the interest form.
- Understand if the user was interested in the service: Get 20% click on the Register button and 20% on the “Unete” button.
- Understand if the form of dissemination is efficient: 60% of visits through Linkedin and 20 recommendations in the publication of the Feed.

Metrics
Google Analytics
In this section of Google analytics we can see the total number of events from the day of its launch to the day of the final delivery of the project.
We had 306 events and what we had more results was to scroll in the section “what is it?”, which is the first part of the landing page.


Hotjar
The results below are the results of Hotjar a platform that generates us the heat map of the site and so we can see which areas were most visited and if our CTAS were clicked.
Through Hotjar I obtained the following results:
58,4% of users accessed the web through Desktop and 55% of Desktop users have scrolled through the “Unete” section.
41.6% of users accessed the landing through a mobile device and 78% of these users have scrolled to the “Unete” section.
In other words, the people who use the page through the mobile version are already more accustomed to make the scroll movement, while in the desktop version people are more willing to scroll if they are really interested in the content, which means that the interest in the page was not so great.

KPIs Results
In the end I achieved some goals such as the number of users who accessed the web, and visits through the linkedin and recommendations in the publication.

Resume
I believe that the Lean UX approach is essential to prove whether an idea is of interest to the public or not. to know if this product will really solve the problems of a certain type of user.
In the end I didn’t hit most of the proposed KPIs, but maybe with more time and a better disseminationin these landing page the results could have been better.
However, the execution of this project made me understand the importance of testing an idea, even in a short period of time, after all it is important to make mistakes, but to make quick mistakes and then test again until having a solution that really has a visible value to the user who will use the product to be developed. With this we save time and money in a real company.