Wattle – Alex Dale

Responsibilities

Product Design

Role

Senior Product Designer

Wattle aims to accelerate Australia’s transition to renewable energy and to give control over their energy back to its customers - providing a pathway to zero energy bills and a lower carbon footprint.

As a product, it’s a renewable energy concierge service that allows customers to get a great deal on energy and to have clear visibility over their energy usage, through smart hardware and a digital product.

During my time working on Wattle I lead the product design process, defining our MVP through test and iteration cycles and setting the future direction on product features.

Assessing the Problem

Customers are concerned about the cost, complexity and carbon footprint of electricity. There has been a 56% increase in energy prices over the last 10 years and 78% of households worry about the cost of energy.

50% of consumers don’t feel that they have access to simple information about their energy usagel= - leading to distrust in their energy provider.

In addition - 76% of Australians receive their energy from fossil fuel services. An area where progress is slow for the big energy companies to fully switch over.

Splash & Landing Screen Reveal

Brand Development

We partnered with a creative agency, Roam Digital, over a 4-week engagement. Together, we planned what that looked like - a highly collaborative effort that allowed us to explore the product design and definition whilst the brand was developed simultaneously. Roam provided:

Brand Strategy
Logo Development
Illustrations

Elements of the Wattle brand system

Wattle’s vision is to accelerate the move to renewable energy for all Australians, harnessing the power of nature and technology to address climate change."

- Sophie Gilder, MD of Wattle

Initial Discovery Phase

We worked with stakeholders and external providers to gather business strategy and technical requirements. These included activities such as customer journey mapping, value proposition ideation, sketching sessions and more.

Being involved at this early stage and without a shared vision from the core team on what they wanted to build, these sessions were crucial for us to gain alignment and to cast a wide net in terms of ideas that we could experiment with.

MVP Definition & Prioritisation

Our customer feedback led to clear focus areas for our initial public launch. An energy companion that promises bill and usage clarity and that makes our customers feel good about their switch to renewable energy. Wattle offers an essential utility in energy, so it was important to prioritize foundational product elements to ensure the trust is built with our customers.

Home screen, welcome messages and examples of inisght cards.

Home screen

Designed to be personalised for the user, offering an at-a-glance activity feed that highlights the most relevant and up-to-date information based on their energy package.

Insight cards provide engaging snapshots of their energy usage, contextualising it in a way that connects with our users and avoiding energy industry jargon.

Various sections and components from the Wattle app

Energy Usage

Allows users to get a historical view of their energy usage, filtered by day, week, month and year.

Users felt empowered with this information and felt confident that they could take better control over their energy usage.

An example of a usage screen with solar credit added, and others sshowing it without

Spend screen and example of a billing page

Tracking Spend

Allows users to see all their spend information on one screen and gives access to previous months bills.

The billing page would show the most relevant, digestible information to the user who can download a PDF for more info.

It would also bring in comparative metrics, such as energy used households nearby.

Live Energy Usage View

Allows users to view live energy use within their home, broken down by rooms and areas corresponding to the circuits within their home.

A feature with true energy enthusiasts in mind, customer feedback showed this was something they were incredibly excited by - and would prove to be a good educational tool to teach other family members about responsible use of energy.

An example of historic circuit usage and live views

Marketing Page

Within a short timeframe, we also put together a lightweight marketing page. We created simple and impactful components to be able to easily piece together conversion-optimised landing pages.

In addition, we needed to articulate the vision of our product through powerful copywriting and content design.