How we helped i-charging beat the market
Challenges
To develop an interface to provide support for charging electric vehicles.
Services
UI and UX Design, Backend Development, Frontend Development and Mobile Development.
Outcomes
An ecosystem of interconnected applications for electric vehicles.
i-charging is changing electric mobility
The company was born from a desire to radically alter electric mobility for the better. With a focus on technology-based products, a strong will for innovation, differentiation and design, they have always had their sights on the most sophisticated segments of the infrastructure for electric mobility. Their goal is to be the technological reference for the sector. They believe you can do more, sustainably, by investing heavily in quality and leveraging their know-how.
If you want to read more about them, you can find it here.
Navigating challenges: developing an innovative ecosystem for intuitive electric vehicle charging
Untile was originally approached with an idea of what was intended thought through already, which is always, in and of itself, a challenge.
We didn’t have the ability to propose something we felt fell within our wheelhouse of knowledge and had to, in fact, figure out how to meet fully fledged expectations. This was made even more complicated by the fact that there was nothing on the market in any way similar to what i-charging wanted.
This amounted to a fully ecosystem of apps that would work in tandem to ease a very specific action: charge an electric vehicle in a simple and intuitive way.
Empowering i-charging: crafting user experiences and testing innovations
In close collaboration with the i-charging team, we explored and refined the process during extensive work sessions over two weeks, ensuring all steps were accounted for and that we knew enough about the technology in question.
We at Untile developed both the user experience (UX) and the interface (UI) for i-charging's electric car charging points and, during this period, we created several prototypes and conducted internal and external interaction tests to validate and improve our ideas.
Creating innovative solutions for enhanced electric vehicle charging: a deep dive into charging station, mobile app, and maintenance app development challenges
The charging station development
What the market currently offered was the most basic possible solution: you plug the vehicle in, and it charges. The limitations and weaknesses of the devices available on the market were clear. They usually had a poor user experience, little feedback, and very rudimentary authentication and payment methods. They also needed to be geared towards the needs of electric vehicle drivers.
What i-charging wanted was way more sophisticated. They wanted a charging station that would stand outside, with a futuristic and disruptive design (based on electric car dashboards). Our challenge would be to create the whole user experience and user interface for it, including how to handle interaction and accessibility.
Approaching user interaction and error prevention
The first step was to identify the different use cases to work with and the primary user flows to be produced so we could create wireframes from these that would translate how the interface would work from the point of view of the physical interactions with a touchscreen. We wanted to figure out how a user would intuitively use this for the first time, considering the different user flows and how we could prevent possible future problems.
We found many answers by prototyping and user testing the main user flows and taking advantage of our first wireframes. Some adjustments were made afterward, such as interface reaction times, protecting sensitive data in case the user forgets to finish their session, etc.
We also had to try to predict and prevent many edge cases, such as a user having several cars, wanting to pay with several different means of payment, a charging station having up to 4 plugs.
Prioritizing features and design considerations for a better user experience and product life-cycle
The requirements and vision for the product were precise. To reduce the design effort required, we opted to include only the strictly necessary functionalities in the first release and consider all the relevant aspects to guarantee an excellent user experience. This approach allowed us to have a functional product in a short space of time to test and start iterating according to user feedback.
With so many features available, we had to break complex tasks into smaller steps to decrease cognitive load and minimize choices to decrease user decision time and effort. This approach led us to design a simple interface that is easy to interact with and guides the user through his journey.
Maintenance app
The challenge presented to the charging station maintenance application was to assist the operator in setting up and maintaining the equipment, including installation and activation, diagnostics of all hardware components, temperature and humidity control, access to reports and activity logs as well as local firmware and software updates.
All of this needed to be doable from a single tablet or laptop computer. If the Wi-Fi fails, you can do it via ethernet as well. To ensure there were no issues whatsoever, we made it so the whole configuration could also be done from the actual charging station, with no need for an external device at all.
The mobile app
For all intents and purposes, the mobile app is a natural extension of the whole system. It allows multiple users to access the same charging station simultaneously and enables users to perform all the same operations the charging station does on a much smaller screen.
The biggest challenge while developing the app was to figure out how to get the app to connect to an offline charging station. This was fixed by providing the charging station with Wi-Fi hardware that the user could connect through a QR code provided and a virtual card.
Innovative app delivery for the future of electric vehicle charging: a comprehensive ecosystem and collaborative discovery journey
We successfully delivered an app that will serve the future of electric charging for vehicles. The whole process can be configured and defined by the user, starting with the charging power, the percentage of charging, charging time, cost limit, and other parameters, such as payment options and tax information.
None of this was possible with the solutions currently available on the market
We developed a full ecosystem of apps that can operate amongst themselves, including the charging station interface, the mobile app, and the maintenance app.
The customer has given us some valuable feedback, particularly regarding the creation of the UI, which they thought was very much to their liking, and the workshops themselves, which allowed their team to deconstruct their whole process and figure out better solutions than the ones they had in mind.
Our team learned quite a bit about the technology involved in charging these vehicles, which was a deeply enriching experience. This is not all we learned, however. By analyzing the entire process from the user’s point of view, we have grown our knowledge about these patterns and changed some preconceived notions about patterns and the linear processes that underlie these behaviors.
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