Peak Power

UX Redesign of a Smart Energy Management System

At Peak Power, I led the UX redesign of their smart energy management platform, which helps facility managers monitor energy use and manage battery storage. The original interface was complex and unclear, leading to frequent user confusion and support requests. My goal was to improve usability through user research, clearer information hierarchy, accessibility enhancements, and the introduction of intelligent automation.

My Role

As the UX Designer on this project, I led the end-to-end redesign of the platform interface. I conducted user interviews and analyzed support tickets to identify pain points and behavior patterns. Based on these insights, I restructured the interface to improve clarity and usability, with a strong focus on accessibility. I worked closely with both product managers and developers to ensure the design was aligned with user needs and technically feasible, and I supported implementation through design handoff and feedback cycles.

Design Challenges

Although the platform had access to real-time energy pricing and battery data, users were still required to manually trigger charge and discharge actions—often without clear guidance. This led to uncertainty about when and how to act, as reflected in frequent support tickets.

My key design challenges were:

Enabling smarter, data-driven automation to reduce user burden
Simplifying the display of complex battery and pricing information into clear, actionable insights
Improving accessibility for users with color vision deficiencies by introducing inclusive design elements

Design Process

This project followed a full-cycle UX design process, starting from research and strategy, through design and development, to launch and post-launch evaluation. At each stage, I collaborated closely with stakeholders to ensure the solution was both user-centered and technically feasible. After launch, we continued iterating based on user feedback and usability testing insights to further refine the experience.

USER RESEARCH

Deep Interviews: Conduct in-depth interviews with commercial office building managers and energy management experts to understand their needs, pain points, and expectations.

Observation of User Behavior: Observe firsthand how they interact with existing energy data analysis tools, their operational workflows, and usage habits.

When conducting in-depth interviews with commercial office building managers and energy management experts, the focus is primarily on the following aspects:

1. Business Needs and Challenges:
- Understanding their key concerns in energy usage and efficiency, such as high energy costs, energy wastage, and peak usage periods.
- Exploring their current energy monitoring and management practices to identify any inefficiencies or gaps in information.

2. User Expectations and Requirements:
- Investigating the desired features and capabilities for a new data analytics tool, such as real-time data monitoring, predictive analysis, and customizable reporting.
- Determining specific issues they expect the new tool to address, such as improving energy efficiency or reducing costs.

3. User Interface Usage Patterns:
- Observing how they interact with the user interface of existing energy data analytics tools, including methods for viewing real-time data, setting parameters, and generating reports.

STRATEGY

Affinity Map

After conducting user research, using Affinity Map as a starting point to organize and analyze a large amount of user feedback and data can help you understand user needs and priorities more clearly, and provide strong data support for subsequent product design and feature planning. Affinity Map helps ensure that product teams can make informed decisions based on objective user feedback during the strategy formulation stage. This identifies key user needs, pain points, and priorities.

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1. Organize research data: Organize the collected user interviews, observations, and survey results into actionable data.

2. Classify and summarize: Classify data according to similar themes or patterns, such as user needs, problems, expectations, etc.

3. Create an affinity map: In a teamwork meeting or workshop, post the classified data on the wall or electronic whiteboard with sticky notes or digital tools, and classify and organize related points through team discussion and collaboration.

4. Identify patterns and insights: Identify recurring patterns, key insights, and priorities from Affinity Map, which will guide subsequent product strategies and design decisions.

Persona

To help communicate information about users that I collected during research, I created a provisional persona.

Ideate

Task Flow

I created task flows for steps a user typically goes through in order to complete two common tasks in PeakPowe:

User charges or discharges the ESS (energy storage system)

User charges or discharges the V2G (vehicle to grid) system)

To better understand where in the process users were having trouble, I highlighted the areas in orange where most users struggled, where I want to focus most during the redesign.

Lo-Fi Sketches

Based on the established pair points, I sketched multiple options to test and see how by initiating minimal changes to optimize the user experience. During the process of redesign, I continued referring to the target audience, company mission, revenue model and my goal to focus on how to improve the user experience rather than making design changes. After a few rounds of iterations I came to a good place with the solutions.

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PROTOTYPE

Hi-Fi Prototype

Moving forward with process, I turned my Lo-Fi sketches into Hi-Fi prototype. Below are the screen comparison showing before and after side by side.

Peak Power Report App

Reports are categorized by hour, day and week.

HMI

Use HMIs to monitor machinery to make sure it's working properly.

VALIDATE

Before

After

Conclusion

After two weeks of user research, analysis and redesign, I was able to validate the assumptions and changes I had made. I did this by testing my clickable prototype with even new users. The results are:

Looking for building status: 7 out of 7 users found it on the home screen in 5 seconds.
Graphs: 7 out of 7 users can understand the content.
Electricity market prices: 6 out of 7 users were able to find it quickly.
Automated charging and discharging: 7 out of 7 users were able to select easily.
SoC(State of charge) status: 6 out of 7 users said showing soc1, soc2 was very helpful.

Notes: For future studies, I would like to spend more time collecting data on how often users call operators and how often users update default settings. Also, how is this received from the business side.

After Thoughts

This project has been a challenging and rewarding experience for me. At the beginning, I was overwhelmed by the idea of having to talk to experienced managers for usability testing. However, it turned out to be an amazing experience to understand users and find out what makes them tick.

Although I had a very short timeline for this project, I am glad to learn that even by making small changes, we are able to yield big impacts and create a great experience for users. It is so important to always validate our assumptions through testing.