MISO Energy Case study

MISO Energy Case study

A SaaS Web application for market participants (users) to conduct their official business through MISO

Start

About MISO Energy

MISO (Mid continent Independent System Operator) energy is an independent company which facilitates business transactions between Energy generators and Energy distributors.

Team

My team

Client team

My role

Design the Saas software portal from end to end with the research that MISO had for 10 years.

3 Product designers including me for a year apprenticeship

Customer experience manager, a UX designer, a developer and other stakeholders

+ Skills

+ Objectives

Problem

MISO energy had many pain points which were categorised into high level problems to be prioritized to craft a better solution that has a greater impact

Pain points

High level problems

Why prioritize

+ Insights

+ Insights

+ problems

Business requirements

New onboarding process for users

Optimise the User experience for MISO system and tools

streamlined SaaS portal

Solution

To Design a central gateway portal for all participants to conduct their official business through MISO.

Impact

Helped MISO Energy save time and resources by crafting a solution from their 10 years of research

The design solution was very intuitive for all the users of MISO energy

MISO tools and services

THEN

User registration page 1

User registration information

User registration page 2

registration forms

MISO help center

MISO services page

+ Insights

Business pratice manuals

Market analytics

Main Landing page

NOW

+ Insights

Portal Dashboard

Resources page

Help Center

Process

MISO research

Secondary Interviews

Competitor analysis

Ideation

Usability testing 1

Prototype

Usability testing 2

Iteration

Roadblocks

Learnings

MISO research

MISO had 10 years of background research on customers with personas and customer journey maps. The displayed images are 2 examples of 40 different personas

+ Insights

Go back to process

Secondary Interviews

We did field research with direct customers to know more about the User experience of MISO complex tools and services

+ Insights

Go back to process

Competitor analysis

We did find relevant independent system operators similar to MISO energy to understand their User experience with services they provide

Alberta electric system operator

+ Insights

Electric Reliability Council of Texas

Go back to process

Ideation

We laid out wireframes for the new market participant registration process with better UX and one-stop access of all the features for the customer gateway portal

+ Insights

Go back to process

Usability testing 1

We did a preliminary testing to validate low-fidelity wireframes with the product team of MISO Energy and some of its stakeholders.

+ Insights

Go back to process

Prototype

From the feedback we designed hi-fidelity prototypes for market participant registration process and a new customer gateway portal with a Dashboard, help center and a resources page.

+ Insights

Go back to process

Usability testing 2

We did a another testing to validate high-fidelity prototype with the product team of MISO Energy and some of its stakeholders.

+ Insights

Go back to process

Iteration

Based on the feedback from both the usability sessions we iterated the customer gateway portal by adding requested features.

+ Insights

Go back to process

Roadblocks

Communication gap with the client team led to delayed handouts and research needed for us to work on the project. Comprehending broad research for insights

+ Insights

Go back to process

Learnings

• How to communicate effectively with non-design stakeholders regarding the design process and ideas
• How to prioritize the problems with the business requirements
• Solving real problems involves roadblocks, as a designer it is important to embrace them along the journey

Back to first slide

Go back to process

Learnings

• How to communicate effectively with non-design stakeholders regarding the design process and ideas
• How to prioritize the problems with the business requirements
• Solving real problems involves roadblocks, as a designer it is important to embrace them along the journey

Back to first slide

High level problems

No Seamless process

No real time energy insights

Lack of effective communication with MISO control team

Major insights

• Issue with icons meaning was notified during the testing session
• users requested a feature for filtering the general and resource tickets at the Help center page
• The users requested for a quick way to access the business practice manuals
• Product team needed customised notifications for the users when the service requests get addressed

Test the design and iterate

Ideate and Prototype

Analyse the research for insights

Major insights

• Usability testing helped in uncovering missing features in the dashboard by changing certain naming conventions of the services for better UX
• The important feature of downloading financial statements directly was requested by the team and users.
• Some redundant services were noticed in the usability testing

Major insights

• We communicated directly with the customer experience manager as a point of contact to get to know more about the product and to design the vision of customer gateway protocol
• We used the whole two usability sessions to get most of the validation of the designs as the client was not sure about the high level information that needs to go in the gateway portal
• Since we did it start at the ideation phase it was challenging to understand the insights as a whole with a company with large portfolio.

Insights

• Solving the seamless process involves the user registration process, defining out resources as active and outage resources which facilitates a seamless experience.
• Providing energy insights helps the user to take informed decisions as a market participant in the energy grid sector.
• Providing better communication for user with MISO help center improves the user experience.

Major insights

• User has to traverse 5 to 10 different embedded websites or links to perform dialy business activities such as accessing help center, practice manuals, user registration and user services
• There is no collective data overview of all the data together in a portal which really helps the user reduce the burden

Major insights

• There is no seamless process to becoming a market participant
• No real-time insights about different entities in the MISO dashboard

• Users were not able to communicate everything with the MISO control team

Major insights

• Wireframes helped in creating the initial idea of registration and the central gateway portal in a single page
• Wireframes helped in ideating scenarios by reducing the user to jump into different portals
• It also helped in eliminating redundant steps for registration like repeating steps or filling manual forms.

Major insights

• Prototyping helped in visualising the vision of the one stop solution of the customer gateway portal
• It also helped bring out the new resources page with users to download statements and different states of the resources (available or outage)
• Providing a new way of communicating with the help center for users

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Major insights

• All the user registration (Market participant) information and process have been included the new landing page
• MISO help center, Practice manuals and Real time market display have been now included in the Customer gateway portal dashboard which helps in collective overview for the user

Single persona - Aiden

With this research, we understood that confining to a single major persona can help solve the necessary market participation and defining the vision of a centralised Customer gateway portal

With Masters in HCI and work experience in the field helps me communicate better even with the non-design stakeholders

With a background in Computer science,this helps me effectively understand developer constraints

Pain points

• Could not able to view historical data based on timeline (few hours back, yesterday’s data, a month data).
• Could not able to view real time updates like emergency declarations and notifications.
• Could not able to view weather snippets for different cities.
• Dont have a collective view of power outage, high level information in the dashboard.
• lack of clarity of high level context to what approvals and steps are needed before starting each process

• Need of new application and onboarding process and interface
• Need of some sort of tracker that tells users what actions they need to take for registration
• Different registrations for every entity.
• Don't have a seamless communication with the MISO’s control room.
• Should switch between entities.

• Do not have a collective view of all the start and stop’s for powerplants.

Major insights

• We did find their market participant or the users registration information did have a good user experience
• Even though they are no direct competitors we did find their process of information site map being helpful for designing the new portal for MISO energy

Major insights

• MISO Energy was very happy with the new designs
• Icons were named to provide better understanding of its functionality
• Filter option was added for filtering the general and resource tickets at the Help center page
• Quick links were added to access the business practice manuals
• notifications now also provides the users when the service requests get addressed