Power Saver Rewards Program Enrollment Flow
Project Overview
The Power Saver Rewards program is a residential energy program run by all three major energy utilities across California: PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E. The program encourages participants to save energy during Power Saver Rewards events, which happen when there is an electrical grid emergency. When participants save energy, they get paid in the form of a utility bill credit.
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Olivine, Inc. currently implements the Power Saver Rewards program on behalf of PG&E and SCE. The goal of this project was to create a way for customers to easily enroll their home(s), disenroll their home(s), and/or update their contact information for the Power Saver Rewards program.
Role: I was the UX & UI designer for this project. Responsible for imagining what the end-to-end experience should look like.
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Team: I worked with the technical project manager, CTO, and a lead software developer to understand the requirements and to iterate upon the design.
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Scope & Constraints: This project had a large amount of complexity on the backend and a short timeline, paired with typical development resource constraints.
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I was specifically asked to use as many components as possible from existing enrollment flows that were in production since there was a large set of requirements to get these programs online in a short time frame.
Finally, I was not able to speak directly with users or conduct usability testing throughout the design process. Required to utilize design best practices and insights from users in previous projects.
Design Process
There were requirements to create a way for customers to enroll their home(s), disenroll their home(s), and/or update their contact information for the Power Saver Rewards Program. The Power Saver Rewards Program was legally required by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). This process was mandated to not require a customer to create an account to take any of these actions. The program encourages participants to save energy during Power Saver Rewards events, which happen when there is an electrical grid emergency.
I gained an understanding of the requirements and what inputs we needed to incorporate to validate a customer’s identity. The initial design concept was to allow the user to put in their information on the same validation screen and it would direct them to where they needed to go based on the information we had in our systems. For example, if they weren’t enrolled in the program, they would be sent to the enrollment flow. If they had at least one home in the program, it would bring them to a centralized place where they could see an overview of their enrollment status and the contact information that they had on file.
Low Fidelity Sketches
Higher Fidelity Mockups
However, after discussing this concept with the development team, they were concerned that this design would be too time-intensive to develop. There could not be any risk of not meeting our strict deadline with the client. The development team proposed using the components from an existing enrollment flow and making the experience more of a linear flow for all tasks.
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With this structure in mind, I then outlined a flow for the tasks considering different use cases and iterated upon them with the development team and project manager. I focused on utilizing straightforward language and including tooltips throughout the flow so it would be easier for a person who is not familiar with the energy industry to complete.
Program Enrollment User Flow
Enrollment / Contact Update User Flow
We then demonstrated the different use cases of the flow with the client. Next, we made updates to the copy to align with their branding standards. The client gave us feedback that in other programs that they had implemented, they found it difficult for residential customers to get their account and meter number. This created a barrier to completing the enrollment process. We updated the design to incorporate information that would be easier for a customer to obtain, such as the email and phone number on file for their utility account.
Incorporating these changes into the flow, it was approved by our client and ready for implementation. Throughout implementation, I worked closely with the development team to test the enrollment process. We worked through new edge cases we had not foreseen during the initial design process.
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Finally, we launched the new enrollment process on May 1, 2022 along with the statewide launch of the Power Saver Rewards Program.
Final Design
Ongoing Improvements & Lessons Learned
Once the enrollment flow was implemented, we found that users who had one home in the program and one that was still eligible were getting stuck in the enrollment flow. They expected the eligible home to be listed on the same page as the home that was already enrolled, and without the additional context they did not click to the next page. This is an upcoming improvement that we would like to implement.
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In the future, I hope that we can implement a more centralized experience for customers. The current structure lends itself to needing a lot of minor tweaks to fix usability issues, which seems like a bigger sink on development time in the long run.