2022, Sweden
Mestro is a SaaS energy monitoring platform that provides mainly real-estate companies to understand, analyse, and report their energy data.
The platform provides abundant features and data visualisations, but as Mestro continues to grow and develop more features, it requires an investigation to balance between powerful functionality and a good UX.
Responsibility
Examined the platform by analysing personas, customer journeys, interviews, and user evaluation. Redesigned the user flow and corresponding UI to improve the UX with verification through another evaluation. The redesign improved task performance and received positive feedback from both users and internal teams. Mestro also planned to roll out some of the updates in the following quarters.
Tools
Figma, Miro, Qualitative Research
Task Performance
63% improvement
Feedback
Positive from both users and internal teams
Supervisor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Aksel Biørn-Hansen
Supervisor at Mestro
Anton Karlkvist
Process
This project followed the double diamond design process where I iterated through the 1st diamond twice. The first is in Pre-study to discover and define preliminary issues, and the second is in the Interview Study to discover more about end-users and then define issues through User Evaluation. Afterwards, I Sketched and Prototyped to develop the ideas and solutions and deliver with Redesign Evaluation.
In Pre-study, the selected persona, Fredrik, works at a real estate company as a technical manager who is familiar with EMS and is the main user of the system. His responsibility is to make sure properties are doing good in data linkage and energy usage and to improve energy performance. In his journey within the system, he wants to see both overview and specific information with the least effort or clicks.
Interview Study was conducted through Semi-structured interviews with 5 participants from internal teams revolving around users’ behaviour and attitudes. Both User Evaluation and Redesign Evaluation were done with 4 participants in 3 sessions through 3 main tasks in the Think-aloud Protocol with a follow-up interview.
Problem
Two main issues discovered in Pre-study were the user flow did not provide a clear conceptual model of the system, and the report settings used mainly toggles without considering the relationship between options. These issues were also found in User Evaluation along with other practical problems.
Solution
My redesign started with the reorganisation of the user flow, simplifying 9 pages into 5 parts with 7 pages. Closely connected pages are put in pairs and removed redundant pages to provide an easier understanding of the conceptual model of the system. The redesigned report settings shortened the length by half by considering the relationship between options. The ones that only support a single selection were turned into drop-down menus, and multiple selections were made into grouped toggles supporting quick selections and cancellations.
The redesigned user flow was reflected in the prototype through visual cues. The redesigned settings information on each page was made interactable instead of showing texts of the selections to improve efficiency. Other issues found in User Evaluation were also resolved and provided more direct manipulation and customisation for different analytical needs of end-users.
Many of the changes made use of the design literature, 10 Usability Heuristics and Human-Data Interaction Guidelines. The redesign also considered business aspects to showcase or promote different packages of the system.
