Web and mobile applications that motivate users to save on utility costs and conserve energy, by providing personalized usage insights.

Context

Empower smart energy decisions by providing deep insights on energy behavior.

Problem

Unable to grow beyond the loyal energy-enthusiast customer base.

Bidgely struggled to sell its web and mobile solutions to utilities due to low user retention and engagement. Most people rarely think about their energy usage—studies show the average American spends just seven minutes a year on it—making it tough to drive meaningful interaction.

As Bidgely’s first design hire, I inherited a fragmented design language shaped by various contractors. My challenge was to refine every customer touchpoint and build a cohesive brand for the growing startup.

Approach

Draw parallels from human-human trust to build the trust on product.

When I joined Bidgely, I noticed varying assumptions about the target users and value propositions. To align the teams and stakeholders, I spent weeks documenting personas, storyboards, and journey maps, using both internal knowledge and telemetry data to validate assumptions.

With clear product goals established, I mapped the end-to-end user journey alongside telemetry data. A major drop-off occurred during setup—many users struggled to configure their energy devices. Additionally, engagement sharply declined after a week, with only a niche group of energy enthusiasts remaining active. Since feedback primarily came from this group, the app was unintentionally tailored to their needs, overlooking the broader user base.

From these insights, I focused on key areas for improvement:

Remove onboarding friction

Improve dashboard engagement

Making utility transparent

Led the design and execution sprints to simplify the device setup and onboarding flow.

To ensure a smooth launch for the new energy monitor, we focused on improving the setup experience. Previously, the setup process was buried in the app’s settings, delaying the time to value. I re-evaluated the entire workflow, including steps requiring users to visit utility websites, and recommended integrating setup into the initial onboarding.

I led daily standups with the UI lead, PM lead, and backend engineer to refine workflows and address design challenges. Our goal was a personalized setup experience, featuring custom illustrations and instructions for each supported device. We also streamlined portal jumps and wait times. By collaborating with utility approvers, we reduced setup time from ~18 hours to 15 minutes. Additionally, we automated signup by scraping user data from their accounts, triggering email notifications upon device activation, and ensuring team intervention in case of failures.

Drove the dashboard, mobile app and e-mail engagement.

The Energy Dashboard played a crucial role in boosting engagement, serving as the first touchpoint after setup. Data revealed that most users, except energy enthusiasts, dropped off after initial use.

Over four months and multiple two-week sprints, we introduced features that provided deeper insights into individual energy usage—offering both valuable data points and actionable steps to drive behavior change. We also experimented with game mechanics to encourage repeat use.

To enhance accessibility and support frequent interactions, we prioritized the mobile experience. Since the existing app wasn’t mobile-friendly, we adopted a mobile-first approach, focusing on use cases best suited for mobile. We introduced real-time alerts and notifications to make the application more engaging, proactively helping users to act on altering their energy usage behavior. 

Helping utility agents to answer the most frequent question: Why is my bill so high?

In order to improve the engagement with utilities and eventually their applications, we need to better pinpoint reasons for high bills. We expanded beyond appliance-level breakdowns. I led brainstorming sessions across the company to map real-world high-bill scenarios to measurable metrics, helping refine our data collection and analysis.

A breakthrough came when we realized that comparing bills from similar months (e.g., consecutive months or the same month last year) provided strong insights into usage changes. I proposed integrating this into the application, aligning with when customers typically contact support. By correlating collected metrics, we could intelligently estimate the cause of high bills.

In order to improve the customer-agent relation, we designed a follow-up email summarizing the finding and encouraging customers to review their usage at their convenience, fostering engagement with their energy usage dashboard.

Outcomes