Shell Recharge App
My Role
Lead Service & UX Research & Design
Overview
Shell brought me on board to lead the UX research and design for an iOS & Android mobile app, for electric vehicle drivers around the world.
UX Research
Guerrilla testing
Remote user testing
Lab testing
One on one interviews
Stakeholder feedback
Workshop facilitation
Competitor research
Ethnography
UX/UI Design
Sketching
Wireframing (Axure)
Prototyping (Proto IO)
UI design (Sketch)
UI / development collaboration
Stakeholder communication
Early Research
Before I joined the team, Shell had hired a third party to do a series of research workshops across 6 different markets around the world. It was my job to understand this research and understand what the user needs, goals and pain points currently were, within the Electric Vehicle driver community.
Feature Roadmap
A 'feature roadmap' had been agreed by the team's management and senior stakeholders within the business, that planned out which order the apps features would be built in, that best married up with business goals.
It was my job to advise on how best to approach the next phases of research and design, to best accommodate this plan.
Early concepts
Using the research that had been done, and looking at examples of best practice app design in the electric vehicle market, such as Tesla, I started to sketch and wireframe early concepts.
These ideas would be iterated in workshops with the team.
Designing for Complex User Journeys
The app contained complex user journeys, such as this onboarding 'Registration' journey.
Shell had purchased a company who owned a series of electric charging stations around Europe, called NewMotion.
In order to register for an account, the user had to register for a Shell account, order a charging card, wait for this card to be posted, and then activate this charging card with NewMotion. This posed a significant UX challenge, but through researching best practice onboarding examples involving activating cards such as Monzo, and extensive user testing, the design successfully met these challenges.
Prototyping & Remote User Testing
I built prototypes for user testing with Proto IO.
As many of our initial testing demographic was based outside of London, I used remote user testing software to host the prototype, alongside a testing questionnaire to a section of our test community for feedback.
Lab testing
Later in the project and after more design iterations, I arranged for some lab testing at our offices in Canary Wharf. We used a user recruitment agency to source London-based electric vehicle drivers and brought them in to participate in user testing. The team and I built a test lab and observation room in two adjacent rooms in our offices, using a combination of software and of course, our MacBooks.
Service Design
This project required Service Design alongside the app based UX/UI design. The users were going to interact with real world charging stations, with a physical charging card, and this had to be considered and incorporated into our design and build, so the team and I visited numerous charging stations around London to gain a deeper understanding of the touch points the users would be engaging with.
Design Iterations & Beta Go Live
The team and I documented the learnings from the various testing sessions and put them through our Kanban process on JIRA. These iterations were developed into the build and a beta version of the Shell Recharge App was launched to the test community on March 1st, 2019.
Full go live is expected across the UK, Netherlands, and Germany throughout 2019.
Conclusion
I worked on the Shell Recharge app for 10 months (as of March 2019) and the project so far has been a success. Shell has invested further funding to keep the project moving forward throughout 2019 into 2020, and full go live in multiple markets, including the UK, is expected in 2019.
Project outcomes
Beta Go LIve Launched March 2019 in the UK
Full Go Live Expected For UK, Netherlands and Germany 2019
Designed And Built for iOS & Android
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