OVO Energy, App Design Case Study

OVO Energy switch landing page across three mobile screens

Overview

Research

Decisions

Design

The App

Outcome

Mobile App · Everyday/2024, 6 months/Shipped, handed to in-house team

Overview

A daily app for millions of UK households, where billing, usage, service and regulatory content competed for the same small piece of screen.

Scope: 30+ screens across home, billing, usage, meter submission and support, plus a 40+ component system shared with OVO's in-house team.

The app carried service tasks, billing recovery and product upsell on the same screens with no shared hierarchy, over tariff rules and regulatory copy that couldn't be paraphrased.

At this volume, small friction is expensive: everything that followed came from working out what deserved attention first.

My role

Lead designer for home, billing, usage and support. Ran IA, UX/UI and the component library alongside OVO's in-house product team, engineers and stakeholders.

Impact

01Home answers three jobs on arrival instead of asking people to navigate
02Meter submission halved, bill checks and help cut to their shortest path
03Ranked service, billing recovery and upsell across 12 user journeys
04Built the shared component system with OVO's in-house product team
05Scaled type and hierarchy across 30+ screens, against worst-case content
06Rebuilt the journeys behind 40+ audit findings, then handed over

Research & understanding

Evidence from both sides: what the data counted, what people said.

OVO Energy mobile screens from the switch journey

OVO Energy mobile quote and tariff screens

OVO Energy mobile journey and content screens

OVO Energy mobile screens showing energy tools

Quantitative

Analytics, support volumes and an agreed measurement framework.

Qualitative

10+ sessions across support, ops and product, weekly in discovery.

Behaviour & journeys

App audit, 12 journeys mapped and task analysis on each.

What we learned & what it meant

OVO Energy Your path to 0 illustrated artwork

INSIGHT

What we learned & what it meant

Users open the app for account state; meter reads were buried and the home led them wrong. Three jobs needed different first actions, so we resolved state immediately and kept the rest one tap away.

Key decisions

Account state first, everything else one tap away.

State before navigation

Home answers what customers actually opened the app for, their bill, their usage and their meter reading, presented as live state up front instead of asking people to navigate through menus to find it.

Shorten busiest journeys

Meter submission was halved in steps; bill checks and help were cut to their shortest path in the architecture first, and only once those journeys could not be shortened was any visual layer applied on top.

Service before commercial

Billing recovery, upsell and everyday utility tasks were ranked, not left competing, so every screen leads on one thing and commercial asks never crowd out the task; the same priority was written into component rules.

Louder where it sells

Brand weight flexes by context across the product: account and service screens lead on clarity and calm, while the genuinely commercial moments are the ones allowed to carry the imagery and the louder voice.

Design & system

Design system

Built jointly with OVO's in-house team: tokens, components, patterns and interaction behaviour in one documented source of truth, so new surfaces compose from existing parts, not new one-offs.

Visual language

Type, colour and imagery were re-scaled against real content: regulated tariff copy, long bill breakdowns, low-confidence usage data, so hierarchy holds on the worst case, not the hero shot.

The app

Open it, and the answer is already there.

OVO Energy customer story screens for David and Holly

Home, billing, usage, meter & support

The screens carrying the most traffic, shown as they shipped: account state on arrival, a bill that explains itself, usage in plain terms, meter submission in the fewest steps, and help where the question is asked.

Outcome

A clearer app, and a design system handed to OVO’s team with no agency dependency.

Delivered the redesigned core journeys and the system underneath them, handed to the in-house team with no agency dependency.

What mattered: the system was documented to be extended without us, which is the point of building it jointly rather than handing over a file.