The Company
Wexus is an AgTech company that builds SAAS software to help farmers manage their energy, water and other natural resources. Their goal is to help growers save money, time, energy, and water.
My Role
User Research, Personas, User Interviews, User Journey, User App Flow, Wireframes, Icon Design, Prototyping, and User Testing
The Problem
Thousands of dollars left on the table
One of the easiest ways for a farmer to save money on their energy bills is to change the rate their meter is billed with. This is easier said than done. In order to do this, the user must first have a comprehensive understanding of how each rate works and then analyze twelve months of usage to compare how each rate would effect the bill total. Historically, this had to be done one by one for hundreds if not thousands of meters on a farm and then once the optimal rate is determined the customer has to call their utility company and request the change. All of this takes time farmers don’t have and as a result, meters run for years on expensive rates.
The Solution
Build a tool that automates rate analysis
I lead the product team to create a tool to automatically analyze energy rates and allow the customer to make changes to those rates in bulk without ever having to be on call with their utility company.
User Research
Before even diving into creating this feature, I went into the field and conducted user interviews. These interviews included professionals in the agriculture industry focusing primarily on growers of permanent crops (orchards, vineyards etc.), row crops (berries, lettuce etc.), indoor growers (greenhouses) and dairy farmers to gain a better understanding of the problem. based on those interviews, I was able to create several key personas each with their own list of challenges and objectives.
GENERAL MANAGER
Responsible for general decision-making at the farm level, planning, verifying & overseeing profit & loss including operational costs for all ranches.
Goals: Reduce operational costs. Meet production targets. Meet regulatory requirements for reporting energy and water usage
ACCOUNTANT
Receives bills from local utility on a continuous basis & spends hours manually inputting data into an Excel spreadsheet.
Goals: Needs easy access to data in an exportable format. Wants year-year comparisons & utility data breakdown (gas, electric, water).
Final Wireframes
Savings Alert
Since utility companies only allow customers to change rates once a year, the Wexus rate analysis tool lives on a secondary page in their software. Each year when it comes time to suggest rate changes, a popup alert appears when the customer logs in informing them of how much the customer can potentially save and encourage them to go to the tool to change their rates.
Rate Analysis Tool
The first thing the customer sees is a quick overview of how much they spent on energy in the past twelve month across all meters on their property and how much they would have spent on the optimal rates. They can choose to automatically change their rates or download a spreadsheet of the details for each meter.
Customization
The customer can expand the page to see a more detailed list. They can view each meter, it’s current rate, the Wexus recommended rate as well as their current costs and potential savings. From there, a customer can customize their rate analysis. If for some reason they don’t wish to switch to the Wexus recommended rate they can use the drop down menu to select a different rate and the list automatically recalculate savings (or lack-thereof). The customer can also choose to remove certain meters from consideration for rate analysis via a checkbox.
chaging rates
Once a customer is satisfied with the list of meters they want to include and the rates they want to switch to, all they need to do is press a button and their utility company is notified of the desired changes.