Volta Charging

Setting up a design strategy for Volta required participation from several teams, as well as tons of planning and building foundational design elements.

This included, but not limited to:
• help plan and organize the mobile product
• work closely with stakeholders, product and engineering teams to build valuable user centered designs
• create documentation and set up design process
• build the Volta design culture that showcases strategic design thinking and concepts
• design a system for building rapid prototypes
• moderate and run usability studies
• set up a process to identify and communicate design roadblocks and implement solutions

Once we had a plan, the first thing was to have an understanding of our customers. We conducted user interviews followed by usability studies using the current Volta mobile app.

Since Volta has several charging stations in front of their headquarters, we were able to set up and run the usability tests there. Before running a simple usability test, we conducted interviews to understand the Volta customer better, particularly, their motivations, pain points, needs, and how Volta's free charging network can help them.

I synthesized all of the information and observations from both the customer interviews and usability studies, and I built personas. To keep the personas simple, I focused only on four main personas for mobile users. Most users fit into two of the four personas. These personas were printed and placed in the office as a design tool, a driver of conversations for building and improving features of the mobile app.

For future iterations, I could see creating more personas for the mobile users, as well as personas for Volta's media and installation partners.

Now that we had an understanding of the users, the next step was to understand the Volta Charging stations and network infrastructure. I had several conversations with our engineering, operations, and sales teams. The chargers were built and run on third party software. The Volta Charging cloud is set up to communicate to the third party network.

After these conversations, I had a better understanding of how the chargers operated, how the Volta backend is set up, and how the mobile app communicates with them. We were now able to design better experiences for the users.

Because the Volta product is a physical experience, there is a challenge in connecting the user to their car with only their Volta account. To help understand where the user is in the physical and digital worlds, user flows became imperitive to understand their pain points and how to design a seamless experience.

I considered building an experience around user behaviors to reduce friction and cognitive load on the users. Because of Volta's infrastructure, edge cases were a huge part of the Volta charging flows, and presented several design and engineering challenges.

To help communicate screen-level layout ideas, I created wireframes and helped put together workflows. Workflows were helpful to communicate user tasks to the product and engineering teams. Since the Volta mobile app is fairly complex, we needed a way to describe user interactions and the dynamic content, such as hours of operation and availability states. We combined the wireframes and workflows and also created a process for documentation.

As part of the growth and performance initiative, I implemented a design system that increased velocity in the design and development process. All charger availability states were documented, along with specifications, rules, and guidelines.

To improve communication between engineering, product, and design teams, I created an index with naming convention for all screens. I also implemented a plugin that quickly updated the content in the mocks once they were updated in a spreadsheet.

We worked closely with the brand design team to ensure the Volta brand resonated in the mobile app. In particular, we created colorful, delightful, and on-brand screens for the charging sequence.

These screens tested well with customers in usability studies. They served as a way to tie the physical charger to the digital mobile app, as well as a way to invoke trust with the customers by introducing the brand identity, and more importantly, the screens served as a way to reduce perceived latency.

Once foundational product design elements and processes were established, it became easier and faster to work on and build out new improvements and features. The first new feature the product team tackled was adding payments to DC Fast Charging stations. Because we now had an established desgin process, documentation, and a design system, we were able to design and build this new feature 50% faster than features before the foundational work.