OVO Energy, App Design Case Study

OVO Energy's customer app, used daily by millions of UK households. A home screen carrying billing recovery, usage, meter submission and product upsell with no shared hierarchy, on top of tariff rules and regulatory copy that couldn't be paraphrased, and a support team answering the same five questions every week.

Overview

Process

Overview

A daily app for millions of households, rebuilt around what customers actually open it to do, not what the org chart said they should.

Scope: Home screen, billing, usage, meter submission, support entry points, and the system the in-house team kept shipping against.

The hard part wasn't visual. The home screen carried billing recovery, usage, meter submission and product upsell with no shared hierarchy, on top of tariff rules and regulatory copy that couldn't be paraphrased. Support was the loudest signal in the room, the same five questions every week, all answers buried two screens deep.

Impact

01Built a measurement framework so the redesign had a bar to clear, not a tidier interfaceBuilt a measurement framework so the redesign had a bar to clear, not a tidier interface
02Made the home screen do one job in one glance for millions of householdsMade the home screen do one job in one glance for millions of households
03Shortened meter submission, the highest-volume support contactShortened meter submission, the highest-volume support contact
04Resolved the home-screen fight between billing recovery and upsellResolved the home-screen fight between billing recovery and upsell
05Held tariff rules and regulatory copy inside flows that read simplyHeld tariff rules and regulatory copy inside flows that read simply
06Co-built a system OVO has shipped against for two years without reworkCo-built a system OVO has shipped against for two years without rework

The Process

Discover

Define

Ideate

Design

Phase 01 / 04

Discover

Understand the customer, the business and the existing product.

Review & Kick off
Business model canvas
Measurement framework
Staff interviews
Website review

The Discovery Phase

Review & Kick off

Analytics, support tickets and user feedback all pointed the same way: customers fell off in the first 30 seconds because the home screen led with the wrong thing.

Business model canvas

Mapped OVO's segments and revenue streams against the app surfaces. The home screen was carrying both billing recovery and product upsell with no hierarchy between them.

Measurement framework

Defined success across engagement, support deflection and conversion, so the redesign had a measurable bar to hit, not just a tidier interface.

Staff interviews

Two weeks of interviews across support, ops and product. Support surfaced the same five questions every week, those became the home screen's job-to-be-done shortlist.

Website review

Audited the existing app and parity website, broken global nav, weak hierarchy on mobile, CTAs competing for the same moment. All became redesign priorities.

The Definition Phase

OVO Energy user personas: David Thompson, Becky Smith and Emma Richards

User archetypes & personas

Three personas & archetypes, bill-checker, usage-curious, moving-house, each opening the app for a different first action. Home screen had to lead with state, not navigation; the other two stayed one tap away rather than buried.

Customer journey mapping

Mapped end-to-end across billing, usage and support. Biggest leak was meter submission, slow, hidden, the highest-volume support call. It became the redesign's first target and set the bar every other flow had to clear.

The Ideation Phase

User flows

Cut the highest-volume tasks, meter read, bill check, get help, to their shortest possible path before any UI was drawn. If the IA didn't make them short, no visual layer would.

IA & Navigation wireframes

Restructured the IA around the three things support was answering most , bill, usage, meter reading. All resolved on the home screen in one glance, everything else one tap away. Navigation stopped being where customers solved problems and became where they went when the home screen didn't already answer.

The Design Phase

Visual audit

Audited type, colour and imagery across the app and parity website. Marketing weight was fighting utility, hero imagery on account screens, low-contrast secondary actions, brand styling crowding tariff data. Reset the rule: louder where it sells, quieter where it serves.

Design system

Built jointly with OVO's in-house team, tokens, components, patterns and interaction behaviour in one source of truth. The brief was explicit: it had to be something a permanent team could extend without an external agency in the room.

Wireframes

Wireframes locked layout, structure and content priority for the most-used screens, so review cycles argued about what the home screen should lead with, not what it should look like.

Concept exploration

Pressure-tested every direction on the worst-case screens, the bill, the usage breakdown, the regulated tariff comparison, not the easy hero shots. The system that survived held its shape under real content load and the team's two-year roadmap.

Conclusion

A clearer app, and a design system the OVO team has now run, alone, for two years.

The home screen leads with bill, usage and meter reading, the three answers support gave most. Navigation is sharper, hierarchy survives mobile, and the journeys customers come for are noticeably shorter.

Key decision: led the home screen with account state over navigation. Cost some discoverability for secondary features; bought back the 30 seconds most customers were losing before they found their bill.

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