SSE | Inviqa

The challenge

SSE first came to us looking to run a research study on its customer-facing website, after which we became an ongoing partner, working on a retained basis as an extension of the in-house design team.

Our key objectives are to:

Conduct ongoing research to validate our collaborative design work, ensuring SSE can grow the business digitally and cater for new and existing customer needs.
Provide design leadership to the team, helping streamline and improve the design output and providing additional design resource.
Act as strategic partner, helping manage the digital roadmap whilst guiding and upskilling teams to follow best practice user experience and drive efficiencies.
Change the way SSE delivers digital products, moving away from small tactical design projects to well-executed design sprints in collaboration with the business and technical teams.

In line with SSE's business objectives we've focused our work on the acquisition of new customers, the channel shift towards digital touch-points, and the retention of existing customers.

What we did

We work on-site with SSE's team every week. We're truly embedded within the digital department to build understanding and to have a greater influence on the organisation's ways of working.

To give a snapshot of this collaboration, to date we have:

Run workshops with senior stakeholders to establish and evolve business objective and KPIs.
Assessed SSE for digital maturity so we could establish development opportunities. We have trained and mentored the design team in all aspects of user experience.
Worked alongside the team to manage and support a roadmap of tactical projects, running lots of research to provide actionable insights into (a) the acquisition-focused website; and (b) the online account area.
Introduced and executed collaborative design sprints, working alongside the design team and business stakeholders to run through phases of Discovery research, concepting, guerilla testing, prototyping, and usability testing.
Helped develop testing strategies for SSE's A/B and multivariate testing programme.
Developed personas to represent customers and helped embed these into the business, based on the vast number of research sessions we've conducted.
Worked collaboratively to develop a design pattern library to improve the consistency of design across projects and make the team more efficient.

Female and male attending user testing session

A better experience for everyone

With an ageing customer base, SSE is embracing inclusive design and working hard to deliver an accessible service to all its customers alike.

SSE’s online sign-up journeys represent the most important and profitable user experiences on its site.

For this reason, Inviqa and SSE used the series of high-profile, sign-up journey design projects to kickstart the organisation’s accessibility journey.

These initiatives provided the ideal opportunity to conduct a full review of the organisation’s digital design patterns and style guide to ensure web accessibility was baked into everything.

Designing for all was the core message communicated through the new design principles, which resulted in significant changes to the core brand colours and colour hierarchy to meet accessibility contrast guidelines.

After implementing the new design principles and other technical and usability measures identified through a dedicated accessibility audit, SSE set about conducting accessibility testing with real customers to drive out further improvement opportunities.

In this way the organisation is successfully establishing a culture of accessibility, ensuring accessibility is baked into product designs, and educating internal stakeholders on the importance of catering to customers with accessibility needs.

Easy meter readings

SSE was keen to create an app that made it easier for users take accurate meter readings and easily access their bills and information on their energy usage.

We supported the product design and usability testing process, which included:

An initial feature prioritisation workshop
5 design sprints, including an initial Discovery sprint assessing other apps (both within the energy market and beyond)
3 rounds of user research
An accessibility audit

SSE now has a comprehensive app that makes it easy for SSE customers to access all their essential information and submit meter readings.

One of our favourite features is the automated meter reading. Customers point their phone at their meter, which automatically turns on their phone torch for a brighter picture.

The app will then automatically take the reading without any manual entry.

The results

Across the past two years we've transformed the way the digital team works, moving SSE away from silos of small, tactical projects towards truly user-centred design and delivery, with collaboration across different parts of the business.

We've also seen a number of big digital performance improvements including an amazing 200% increase in conversions through the phone and broadband sign-up process.

Our engagement has also helped to raise the profile of the digital team within the business and truly demonstrate the value of experience design.

See more of our work

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