My Fortum -self service app intro

One of my responsibilities during my time at Fortum has been to evolve the user experience of the My Fortum -application. In this series of posts I’m going to talk about all aspects of designing the service - starting with an overview of the application. Later on I will talk more about specific views from the interaction point of view, design philosophy & system perspective, customer journey mapping, way of working, usability tests and working with customer feedback.

I joined Fortum in 2017 and took responsibility for the design from an agency who had kickstarted the app in 2016. The design of the application is simple at a glance. You have a dashboard that leads to subviews by clicking different tiles. Navigation is handled by drilling down on dashboard items. It’s a basic two-tier navigation at a glance, but things get quite a bit more complicated when we get beneath the surface.

The main feature of the application is the ability to follow your household’s electricity consumption. Electricity consumption data in Finland is on a hourly resolution, meaning we can display how much electricity you consume hour-by-hour. However there is a delay of 1–3 days before the grid companies provide the data for us. This is a challenge from the customer experience point of view, as customers have no way of understanding why the delay varies or even exists. More on that later as I’ll delve into some customer feedback on later blog posts.

Other features include showing electricity spot price for relevant customers and setting alarms for electricity price spikes or cheap hourly prices. Customers can also view their invoices and manage their contracts. It’s also possible to buy some extra services from the application such as renewable electricity origin mix or pure solar energy.

Let’s take a quick look on how the service has evolved.

Version 1 (2017)

The original design was somewhat Windows-phone-esque design, with different sized tiles on top of each other.

Some notes on the design:

• The small tiles had pretty good affordance to them as they are rectangle shaped and look like buttons, but the bigger tiles felt less clickable. We tried to remedy that by adding arrows and hints so people would understand the full width elements were clickable as well.
• Generally this design worked quite well on the usability side and scored well in our research, even though it felt a bit stale
• Due to limited colour-palette used (Brand guideline) led to using poor contrast elements and coloured text in the app, which didn’t pass accessibility guidelines.

“The information is very scattered. It seems that there are actually two apps with some overlapping information nested in one app. “ -customer feedback for version 1

Version 2 (2018)

• Before 2.0 we re-visited Fortum’s digital colour palette and it allowed us to use more accessible colours. Also as a general guideline, all content text was switched to using black instead of coloured texts.
• To bring different views more in to line, a general template was introduced to streamline the views. Also interaction-wise we fixed the hierarchical structure on several views, so that it logically follow the order of importance from top to bottom.
• Several new features were added since v1, most of note being the ability to see your electricity consumption in euros instead of just in kilowatt-hours. This is a unique feature in Finland and no other electricity provider has this capability. We also added the prices of the biggest grid companies including taxes, so people get a better view on how much they spend in total on electricity on a daily/weekly/monthly or yearly level.
• Several new tiles were added to the home screen as the number of features grew, this led to a very complex structure and a very long dashboard on front page as the UI tiles didn’t scale very well.

“I really feel like acknowledging your consumption of energy is important” -customer feedback version 2

Version 3 (2019)

• We re-structured the dashboard in order to cope with the growing number of features. We standardised the size of the tiles so that for each customer you only see one big tile and then several smaller tiles which are all the same size. This allows for scalable design.
• We also replaced most of our components with our Fortum Design System’s components as they were developed and did even more restructuring on several pages in order to make the experience more unified.

“New design is very fresh”

“Easy and user friendly”

“Easy to use and understand. Nice to follow your consumption daily and seeing the effect on your invoice”

-customer feedback for version 3

Thanks for reading!

In the future I’m going take a more detailed look on some aspects of My Fortum design and how we are working with customer feedback in order to make the best possible app.

Fortum is a leading clean-energy company developing and offering solutions for our global customers in electricity, heating, cooling, as well as solutions to improve resource efficiency. Digitalization is enabling us to create new customer offerings and improve the productivity of our businesses. See more on www.fortum.com