British Gas

Designing the engineer experience

Workshop facilitaion
Ethnographic studies
Expert interviews
Breadboarding
Journey mapping
Wireframing
UI Design
System Design
Prototpying
User testing

Overview

I spent 2020 as a UX and Product Designer alongside Graeme Rutherford in an extensive digital transformation program. Our challenge was to improve the day-to-day experience for over 8000 engineers in all aspects of their working life, from booking time off to completing a safety report.

Approach

Working with our user researcher we set up several workshops to talk to engineers, managers, planners and product owners to collectively understand the big picture. This helped us to start shaping our approach and prioritise where to start.

With the big picture visualised, we co-created a list of stories for each area. And after merging and grouping these, we established clear edges (and overlaps) for a series of apps.

These themes then became the starting point for design. We started by breadboarding flows for each area of each app. This format helped avoid getting too concrete too early, working quickly and flag any problems to solve. For example - very quickly, we could see there was a tension between manager approval and automation.

With clarity and logic from the flows, we developed a set of app wireframes. This bottomed out the content hierarchy and form design elements. At this stage, we're collaborating with our BA's and technical architects about underlying data sources.

Wireframes for the Shifts & Flex apps

"Flex" was a new app to incentivise engineer performance. The concept had a series of complex calculations driven by business needs we wanted to validate quickly. We created a tool to give us a realistic view of good days and bad days.