Raiders of the Charge Park
eMobility field research builds character and empathy
My favorite part of working as a service designer is the field research.
Late last year, Fortum launched a project within eMobility to better understand and improve the customer experience at our Charge & Drive EV charging sites. I joined the project as a service designer, with field research as my first order of business.
To most people the term “field research” probably conjures up the image of an expedition into some exotic and dangerous region. Standing around a parking lot outside of Oslo is not quite as glamorous. However, the type of fieldwork we do within the Fortum Design team— getting out of the office to the places where customers use our products, talking to people and listening to their problems and concerns, and watching as they try to use a system or prototype in ways we never expected — is endlessly stimulating. The fact that it is safe and relatively comfortable is a definite plus.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t involve its own trials and aggravations. However, you often learn more from unexpected challenges than from things going according to plan. I’ll discuss a few of the snags we’ve experienced in the field, and what we can learn from them.
I became concerned for the health of the interview subject, dressed lightly in a T-shirt in the freezing wind.
The Winds of Winter
Some of our first field work involved intercepting customers at charging stations to ask them questions or run user tests. Because we began the project just as winter was setting in, the temperature soon became an issue, since not all customers were dressed to be standing around outside for five or ten minutes. Some participants invited us into their car, and in one case I had to break off an interview because I became concerned for the health of the interview subject, dressed lightly in a T-shirt in the freezing wind.
Winter also brought snow and ice, and more than once I found myself slipping and almost falling as I tried to make my way over to a customer. And talking of physical danger, at a site placed along a road, a passing bus squeezed me right up against a car while in the middle of an interview.
A charging site that is busy one day can be deserted the next
The Most Dangerous Game: Customers
Field research also involves a lot of waiting, sometimes in vain, since a site that is busy one day can be deserted the next, for no apparent reason. Even when participants are recruited in advance, they don’t always show up on time, or at all.
They couldn’t find the charging site
In one study, several participants said they couldn’t find the charging site, even with instructions and a Google Maps link — in the time between the recruiting and the study, construction work had begun in the area and a street was blocked off, which was not reflected on the map. In some instances we had to guide them to our location over the phone.
On the other hand, when we’re out at charging sites we are often spontaneously approached by customers asking for help or answers to some question. One Friday afternoon, as we were wrapping up the last round of testing and heading off for a celebratory drink, we ran into a pair of customers who desperately needed to charge in order to make it home, but couldn’t get any of the chargers to work. It took another forty minutes of trying, failing, and talking to technical support before we found the right combination of charger, payment method and steps that would work and get us all on our way.
From Pain Comes Gain
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
— Khalil Gibran
Experiencing these problems and aggravations first-hand is not enjoyable, but it is important, because these are all issues our customers face. Obviously it cannot take forty minutes to start charging — it must be fast, easy and reliable, and when something goes wrong, the cause should be readily identifiable. This is especially important in winter or bad weather, when fiddling with chargers outside can be outright dangerous.
The variability in traffic is mostly experienced from the opposite point of view by our customers, who may end up waiting in line to charge if the site is too busy at that particular time. The unpredictability can be as bad as the wait itself, since it makes it that much harder to plan around charging stops both on longer drives and in the everyday routine.
Finally, the difficulty some participants had in finding our charging sites illustrate the “last 100 m” wayfinding challenge, where drivers are able to make their way to the approximate location of a charging site but are stumped on the final stretch, just when they expect their destination to come into sight.
In the great majority of cases, our customers don’t face any of these problems and manage to charge just fine, but through our fieldwork we are identifying pain points and opportunities to improve the EV charging experience that feed into our design. That way we ensure that eMobility is an adventure, not an ordeal.
