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The world is changing and people’s behaviour and expectations are changing with it. Is a standard statement that says something like, ‘832 units used’ that arrives every 3 months a satisfactory relationship for an energy company to have with its customers?
It’s a rhetorical question, but behind it is the reality of energy consumers switching suppliers, becoming increasingly eco-aware, requiring information about the house and its energy efficiency and an increasing fashion for frugality.
Here lies an opportunity, one that will see the most forward thinking companies anticipating a future where electricity, gas or water customers’ desires and expectations are not dissimilar to consumers who have a relationship with a large national retail brand - companies with national coverage and a multitude of touch points with their customers.
So, smart metering is not just about a 21st century device that can measure and report your energy use at 1 second or 30 minute intervals, or the wireless network that will help record this data and make it available in the cloud. It’s as much about creating an engaging and enduring customer relationship.
For the customer there are opportunities to spend less for the same service through changes in energy behaviour. Off-peak tariffs and energy use at night for high consuming devices like dishwashers will also mean cost efficiencies and greener energy production for the utility companies – energy is cheaper to generate on demand at night.
To be part of this behaviour change, energy companies will become more truly customer-centric. A straight loyalty program may not work, but notions of loyalty and customer service and innovations would be strong differentiators when mixed with other strategies. Strategies that will also help the energy company become more than just an energy supplier. Such a proposition lies in engaging customers through a sense of belonging and notions of community. Consumers are seen to be evolving over a longer period from notions of status symbols where ‘bigger is better’ to a more giving status of sharing and caring.
We are evolving concepts of loyalty and community which we are code-naming ‘green points’. A continuing relationship with a supplier will create some kind of rating that can either be redeemed or traded. From the suppliers point of view it fits strategies to decrease churn or switching between energy suppliers. The supplier also becomes more than a commodity trader when communities are built around notions of energy use compared to similar households or regional comparisons, personalised energy and green advice.
In the UK, equipping households with smart meters by 2020 is becoming mandatory. There is a wider directive that this program must include smart meters with a “customer interface”. The household meter can come out from the meter cupboard or its obscure hiding place under the stairs and take its place in the house and living experience. We see consumer devices with compelling and desirable touch interfaces. Linking to customer engagement, these will be playful, entertaining and will converge with other household digital experiences. A connected touch panel in the house could have many modes – entertainment, shopping, health, as well as a way to manage efficient energy use – to become greener, to be more cost effective, to schedule charging the electric car.
EMC Consulting has partnered with Microsoft in a customer focussed smart metering program. We’ve been considering and designing all things from customer engagement and benefit scenarios, to open standards and protocols for a cloud based and wireless solution, to the consumer interface and modes of use.
We’ve considered the drivers for customer engagement as they walk past the touch panel in their home. Smart meters can make measurements every second, so we have a real-time display. How much is it costing me right now? How am I doing? What does my usage mean? The interface has ‘let me know’ type features – Where is my energy consumption higher that it needs to be? Which rooms? Which devices? Where can I save, where could I be greener?
The interface itself is touch based. To be precise, the home interface is touch based WPF, running in a Windows 7 environment, although it could be embedded. Its web counterpart is Silverlight. We used natural gestures to design the user interactions. The rationale is that an engaging experience is the home is relatively bold, not as detailed as a web page.
We also propose a multi-channel approach. In the home a connected touch device has your energy use as a ‘right now’ type experience with features to attract discovery and encourage energy behaviour changes. A web interface has a similar experience but with a deeper ‘research’ element around energy advice. Both interfaces have touch points with retailing as the suppliers become more than simply gas or electricity brokers. There is also a mobile interface which also includes control scenarios for the home.
So, as an energy and utility company the opportunity exists to evolve the consumer relationship and to embrace the technology as other customer-centric brands with national coverage become interested in the space. Embracing change in energy consumers’ behaviour is also key; as desires and expectations are changing, so rewards for energy efficiency and eco-awareness materialise.
Julian A D Harris | EMC Consulting | EMC Conchango
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If parts of my web or digital spaces know little about me, their interfaces will help me make decisions. If they know more about me, they will make decisions for me.
A semantic giving architecture will move away from search lists where I do the work, to spaces where choices are organised around my interests, my behaviour and intentions, providing a starting point for journeys and experiences related to my world.
A giving architecture will do increasing amounts of my thinking and will involve semantic clustering, visual and assisted decision making. Journeys will emerge where the search result is no longer the end point. A guided journey in and out of search based on context and user intent will emerge. Capabilities for a site or service to display semantic memory coupled with an understanding of context will increasingly provide competitive advantage.
And now the search box is starting to disappear. Users' past behaviour, interests and intention will define the entry and exit journeys and how the experience will sit within wider objectives, whether selling a product or deliverying the needs of a social informivore.
The user experience is increasingly defined by context - intent, user profile / interest and past behaviour. All of this overlayed with a business or consumer process so that 'finding' becomes more of a dialogue than a monologue. As the trend shifts from search box to user behaviour and context, a next-generation search will leverage:
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semantic clustering
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continuous results
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next generation interfaces - visual search, RIAs, multi-touch
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contextual experiences
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experience within a business or consumer process
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user-generated content
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knowledge-sharing networks
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tagging
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highly interactive models (persoanlized ranking)
In short almost all next-generation consumer or enterprise applications will require some form of semantic giving architecture to ensure that the user receives releveant content specific to their needs at different times.
It requires a highly developed ability to determine what a user is actually trying to accomplish and HAS to be smarter and more contextual than google. User experience innovations will ensure that users don't have to work hard to get what they want or to reach their aspirations. Related URLs:
cuil | similpedia | clusty | yahoo! glue
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From Rich Griffin and myself at MIX:UK. Software + services continues its momentum into MIX:UK as George Moore talks about the future, some of the conflicts of client and server and what the future holds. Consumers will push this forwards with the help of Microsoft and its partner build “Software as a Service” applications, giving people better reach across different platforms. But what does this mean? Well, Rich experiences and services that allow us to choose our platform of choice. George Moore talks about the Universal Web and putting the Experience First. At Conchango within a compact team – UX, visual design and development, we have created a WPF application for the event. We’ve provided a rich reading experience, mashed-up with social networking sites facebook and twitter and an interactive timeline for the event schedule. Paul Dawson introduces the MIX:UK eReader.
Adventure Works - a Live Services application built entirely on live services stack. This utilises silverlight streaming and windows live id allowing users to login and have a personalised experience. A cool feature of the application – it uses MSMQ and sends them to media encoder and uploads this output to the silverlight streaming live service. Streaming video through silverlight. All source code will be up on codeplex in the next day or so. Sentient talked about a site that is built on top of the quick apps - a web site called track me which is about tracking and collaborating with your friends. Johnathan Greensted shows us how to intergrate live contacts buddy list into the web page, a new control coming soon is the Windows Live Messenger web control. These ideas are developed from the previous Sports Do site where Live services mapped where people are during a sporting event from their last known GPS position via a Windows smart phone. Geo-coding coding also places video on the map. Scott Guthrie talked through creating RIAs with the Silverlight Studio & Visual Studio 2008. The workflow around designers and developers and support for AJAX in Visual Studio 2008 – javascript intelli-sense for example. Easy Jet Holidays was demoed – some neat features for the holiday lifecycle experience – an AJAX ‘scratch pad’ to save interesting holidays, hotels etc to compare later. More on Silverlight from Scott – the plug-in that’s cross-browser, cross-platform, .NET supporting rich media and rich user experiences. Julian A D Harris and Rich Griffin
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I’ve recently been involved in an enterprise wide program in California for a global energy company. Among our activities User Experience has been a key facilitator in the client-conchango team and early on I spent time focussing on the process needed to successfully integrate a User Experience team within a large scale Agile project. These approaches are being debated within the wider agile and user centered design communities.  There is probably no ‘one solution fits all’ answer and the right process will depend on team structure, project timing, client involvement and the sprint lifecycle. But each time there should be a way to merge User Experience activities with the Agile approach to ensure a successful product designed around the goals of the users and the business.
Getty Center, LA
Perhaps the most challenging aspects are met when focusing on design activities that have traditionally been achieved through an up-front design approach; the design of persona profiles including the overall objectives and goals of archetypal users, and, as the design evolves - the holistic, big-picture vision and structure of the product. This seems exactly where Agile philosophies can help out – continual iteration and feedback into the design and development cycle means that the product re-shapes as the clients business goals and customer needs move on. Go with the flow - if the project methodology along with business and customer needs are flexible, then so too, the customer experience should be malleable and adaptable. This also allows new ideas to be discovered with the client throughout the project. Sprint / iteration 0 for ground work – user persona profiling, user story analysis and conceptual models can be light-weight. Mini-personas and card-sized user stories allow more detailed analysis when dealing with specific objectives of the project. Conceptual models can evolve through collaboration with technical architects and stakeholder validation. Earlier thinking around user goals and product objectives can influence technology and architecture decisions.   
Mini personas, affinity diagram, user stories (from stakeholder / user workshops) So how does this work in practice? There are thoughts and experiences within Conchango and beyond. With me they broadly polarize around 2 types; both have cyclical iteration and ultimately look at discrete chunks – user stories and other requirements lead to interaction design and to low-fidelity user testing. The difference has been that one approach is staggered ahead of the development team and the other coincides. The latter is probably even more collaborative but can be challenging in terms of the holistic picture and achieving the right level of detail. Maybe there is a kind of hybrid where light-weight, mini designs are staggered ahead while a more detailed design of other features happens concurrently…
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A few years back I worked on some very interesting projects for BBCi and Digital Libraries. These were all about user generated content, community, tagging, aggregation and networking in the social-software sense. These notions are now often packaged up under Web 2.0. To me these are about an approach, an idiom, a paradigm or way of thinking. Here’s a mixture of reference points from that period and some that have sprung up more recently: Up My Street, Pageflakes, Prosper, flickR, MetaWishList, AllYourWords, DropCash So, I thought I’d think about how things might be changing for User Experience professionals (or IAs or EAs or 2.0s or whatever we shall evolve into). Firstly, personas could be developed to a deeper level. We’re no longer just thinking about the customer or consumer of information. We want to know why they are contributing. What are their motivations for becoming ‘involved’, why do they create, post and tag content, what do they get out of it? Should we now be thinking about psychological profiles as we add more depth to a socio-demographic or purely customer focussed profile? Ethnographic studies seem more important – deeper context seems appropriate as we delve into a lifestyle pattern that includes motivations to blog or to seek out and value others’ opinions. How about conceptual information architecture? The grand vision, the bubble diagrams and content maps help us envision these environments and touch points with people and technology. And I want to talk quickly about one other method – the prototype. We’ve been talking a lot recently about the benefits of early working prototypes - production quality yes, but maybe not complete. Fine, what Web2.0 offering is on the map without the ‘Beta’ logo? Great – this will help us all when we want to show results, and wish to user test early on. Ultimately the challenge is perhaps to conceptually break down the product so that a smaller component is acceptable and offers value in its own right without compromising the vision.
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Wednesday 10th May, sun streaming through my bedroom window, hmm… time to head over to The Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden and join the fun. WinFX, the Windows Presentation Foundation and of course Vista are designed with some key user objectives in mind - making the user experience more engaging, more productive and more fun.
Paul Dawson (Head of Interactive Media at Conchango) was presenting, and his timely joke was a great ice-breaker that allowed the wow factor to follow, “When Microsoft told us they had some new tools for interactive and visual design, we thought, Oh great! a new version of MS paint!”. Sure enough, when looking deeper, the possibility of rich, next generation, emotive and immersive user experiences become apparent. Vista, WPF/Everywhere allow for the integration of video, 3-D modelling, animation and seamless data. Microsoft’s new design tools (Expression Interactive Designer, Graphic Designer and Web Designer) create an authoring environment to bring these elements together.
So, what else? There was an ‘Importance of User Experience’ session which set the scene. A ‘Designer Tools Landscape’ session acknowledged that there is now an alternative to Flash. An alternative yes, but potentially something more powerful, as WPF builds upon the .NET framework. For me, this could mean a visualisation of objects, whether they are commercial products, research materials or perhaps my own personal details. I love the idea of some of these being sat around my desktop ready for use, and the possibility of my personal details travelling with me when I visit an online store or community that I’d like to join.
So who’s doing stuff with Vista, WPF and the Expression tools? Well, the excellent and ubiquitous North Face demo was well positioned in the theatre time-out zone. Back in the theatre with a captive audience, two great demos from Conchango developed with Expression tools. The FT demo - dropping video into e-mail with continuous play and the idea of an FT widget on the desktop ready to use or alerting as new content arrives. A demon-demo for the Robbie Williams brand offers a concert experience with multiple video streams and camera selection while product visualization (shirts, memorabilia etc) creates a more tactile offering in a ‘let’s move these around, maybe into my shopping cart’ kind of way – brilliant.
So, to Microsoft who demonstrated some of the Expression tools. This is probably a good start in the right direction and maybe they need a further programme of evangelising to get people on board. Perhaps some master classes and I guess there’s always the possibility of showcasing work online…. and then reaching back out to designers and developers that way.
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