Idean's strategic partnership with Centrica/British Gas was a year old by the time I joined, with a track record of consistently good work, high-performing cross-functional product teams and a steadily maturing design system.
I was brought in as one of a handful of product design leads, with the remit of enhancing self-service for customers while supporting tool- and mindset shifts to improve overall design competency across the programme.
"Harry not only manages to take on his own workload and deliver it beyond expectations but is constantly on the look out for an opportunity to help others and push further than the status quo."
— Tom Lane, (then) Product Design Lead at Idean
Self-serve
While it was a relatively short engagement, I got stuck into a few key areas of the British Gas platform: billing; payments; and account management. The most significant piece of work was an overhaul of the account overview, essentially a dashboard of all the moving parts of a customer's account, from usage patterns and meter reading to appointment booking and personal details.
Each of those features was overseen by dedicated product teams but we were responsible for bringing it all together for millions of customers, and that was a considerable challenge. It meant dealing with the competing interests of a wide range of functional requirements, at a time when business focus was shifting away from traditional utility and towards a more nuanced service provision. It was fed into by other - largely inconsistent - journeys, microservices and legacy processes, and it was our job to put a smiling face on this backstage turmoil. It was a handful.
Our approach was to take a step back and evaluate what people actually wanted from these journeys, exactly what information was most useful to them, and when they expected to see it. To dig for that insight, we designed a structured interview covering typical account management behaviours, and a more focused mapping exercise based on an early prototype.
What we found was that our commitment to summarising everything actually made it more difficult for people to retrieve vital data quickly, eg. when waiting for an engineer. In an effort to create contextual shortcuts using a notification concept, we'd also duplicated functionality and added a layer of complexity to our labelling, creating more inefficiencies. Indirectly, our interviews uncovered trust issues with online appointment booking and a lack of after-care that we were able to feed back to relevant teams for further exploration.
I shared research and design responsibility on this project with supreme talent and top bloke, Dave Mullen.
Transformation
As well as supporting product teams, Idean designers were responsible for leading continuous discovery, improving collaboration and introducing service design thinking across the programme.
My role in that was closer to cheerleader than thought leader, but from week 1 I was heavily involved in the Accounts Guild - our collective of designers and stakeholders from self-service workstreams - running workshops, maintaining shared spaces and supporting cross-functional research and design efforts. A particularly successful example was a full-day session (pictured) with the goal of highlighting gaps between teams that were causing fractured journeys, and Tom Lane and I used a twist on the traditional 'how might we' method (borrowed from this article by Stefan Morales) to develop those problems, define and assign actions.
I was also fortunate enough to work with Nucleus - British Gas' design system - one of the most robust and in-depth I've seen first-hand. I supported the core team with design and documentation of new components, participated in sessions aimed at boosting business-wide adoption, and made a cameo as 'User #3' for their usability tests of a bespoke, browser-based design tool.
The work is ongoing, and live at britishgas.co.uk.