OVO Energy

Unlocking a new platform for millions of customers

OVO was in the process of building a new customer portal, Orion. Migrating millions of energy customers away from the existing third-party platform onto Orion was one of their key business objectives for 2020, but migration couldn’t begin because the new user experience wasn’t good enough. Orion lacked basic functionality, had usability issues and couldn’t yet support OVO’s subsidiary brands.

My team (myself, a product designer, product manager and several engineers) ran a complete audit of both platforms: feature gap analysis, customer feedback synthesis, user data review and conversations with every product team across OVO to understand their roadmaps. We identified core UX improvements, built a design system called Nebula and white-labelled the platform to enable migration of OVO Group’s subsidiary brands. SSE alone had a fundamentally different information architecture, which was more interconnected and deeper than Orion’s. Getting them onto the same platform meant understanding the service gaps and creating a core experience flexible enough to accommodate both.

Clearing the path to migration

Orion’s billing experience posed a bigger problem: it had a customer satisfaction score below 4, which meant additional customers couldn’t be migrated until it improved. User feedback pointed to a theme we hadn’t expected, which was that customers didn’t understand the information they were looking at: they related to billing in terms of monthly cycles, but the existing interface scattered that information across multiple modules.

I led a one-week sprint to design and test an improved billing experience. We quickly built a prototype to test against the existing design, with decisive results: participants consistently failed basic tasks in the existing experience, often believing they’d completed steps when they hadn’t. Every task in the redesigned prototype was completed successfully. The redesign was built by the Billing team and rolled out immediately. The resulting boost in customer satisfaction meant migration could resume, with Orion becoming the default experience for 100% of OVO customers.

The sprint became an internal case study on effective ways of working across OVO. I also led Figma adoption across the wider design organisation of 50+ designers, replacing a fragmented tooling setup that was slowing collaboration.

Helping customers understand their energy use

Home energy contributes over a quarter of UK household emissions, but most people have no visibility into where their energy goes. I worked with a team of data scientists, researchers and a junior designer to prototype and ship Energy Spotlights: a tool that breaks down monthly energy consumption by area of the home and suggests ways to reduce it.

Orion’s evolution needed to address feature gaps, fix user experience issues and flex to the needs of subsidiary brands.

SSE’s deeper information architecture required a flexible core experience for Orion, not a reskin.

Testing an updated billing experience against the existing flow. Participants consistently failed basic tasks in the old experience.

OVO billing interface before redesign, showing account information scattered across multiple disconnected modules — Customers struggled to understand their billing information at a glance.

Redesigned OVO billing interface organising statement history and balance within a monthly cycle view — The redesigned experience organised this information within billing cycles.

Orion customer portal after full migration, now the default experience for all OVO customers — The migrated platform, now the default experience for 100% of OVO customers.

Early sketches exploring layout and concept ideas for the Energy Spotlights feature — Exploratory sketches for Energy Spotlights.

Early Energy Spotlights prototype showing a breakdown of a customer's home energy consumption by category — An early prototype showing a breakdown of a customer’s energy use.

Live Energy Spotlights feature showing monthly energy use broken down by area of the home with reduction suggestions — The live Energy Spotlights experience. Mockups by Mockuuups Studio.

“The new billing experience is much clearer and a real step forwards.”

Ed Conolly, CTO at OVO Energy

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V&A Museum

Unlocking a new platform for millions of customers

Unlocking a new platform for millions of customers

Clearing the path to migration

Helping customers understand their energy use

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