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.

My role

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

Client team

My team

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

3 Product designers including me for a year apprenticeship

+ Objectives

+ Skills

Team

Test the Designand iterate

Ideate and Prototype

Analyse the research forinsights

My role

I was a product designer for MISO energy for a year apprenticeship. I had to step in the ideation phase till testing phase to ensure the Saas software portal to be designed from end to end with the vast research that MISO had for 10 years.

Lack of effective communication with MISO control team

No real time energy insights

No Seamless process

Pain points

Problem

MISO had complex systems which were not streamlined and user had to jump in to different systems to accomplish daily business tasks which lacked intuitive user experience.

Why prioritize

High level problems

Pain points

Problem

+ problems

+ Insights

+ Insights

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

New onboarding process for users

Optimise the User experience for MISO system and tools

streamlined SaaS portal

Business requirements

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

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

Impact

Solution

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

Market analytics

Business pratice manuals

MISO help center

User registration information

User registration page 1

User registration page 2

registration forms

MISO services page

THEN

MISO toolsand services

+ Insights

NOW

Main Landing page

+ Insights

Portal Dashboard

Resourcespage

HelpCenter

Competitor analysis

Learnings

Process

MISO research

Secondary Interviews

Ideation

Usability testing 1

Prototype

Usability testing 2

Iteration

Roadblocks

MISO research

+ Insights

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

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

Electric Reliability Council of Texas

Alberta electric system operator

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

+ Insights

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

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

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

Secondary Interviews

With the Genially templates, you can include visual resources to wow your audience. You can also highlight a particular sentence or piece of information so that it sticks in your audience’s minds, or even embed external content to surprise them: Whatever you like!

Show enthusiasm! Breathe deeply and say what you came to say.

01

Structure your content

Sections like this help you create order

+190

You can enter numbers like this

+45k

Even if you’ll explain it verbally

If you’re going to present live, we recommend training your voice and rehearsing; the best improvisation happens when you’re prepared!

You can make an outline to summarize the content and use words that will be imprinted in the memories of your audience.

Relevant data

50%

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of our brain is involved in the processing of visual stimulus.

Timeline

I’m an awesome subtitle, ideal for giving more context about the topic at hand

20XX

Plan

20XX

Structure

20XX

Design

20XX

Communicate

20XX

Impress

Step 10

Step 8

Step 6

Step 4

Step 2

Step 1

Step 9

Step 7

Step 5

Step 3

Timeline

Timeline

You can briefly describe what the timeline of your presentation consists of and state the milestones achieved verbally so that no one falls asleep.

20XX

Plan

20XX

Structure

20XX

Design

20XX

Communicate

20XX

Impress

90%

of the information we assimilate is received through sight. Tell stories with graphs!

50%

of our brain is involved in the processing of visual stimulus.

85%

of purchases are emotional. The passion that storytelling causes is our ally in influencing the purchasing decisions of our audience.

Graphic + text

Graphs are very shareable so they are ideal for social media and, as if that wasn’t enough: they usually generate quality traffic for the content we create.

Table + texto

Write an awesome subtitle here to provide context

Showing enthusiasm, smiling, and maintaining eye contact with your audience can be your best allies when it comes to telling stories that excite and capture the audience's interest: 'The eyes, chico. They never lie'. This will help you connect with your audience. Knock their socks off!

Table + texto

Showing enthusiasm, smiling, and maintaining eye contact with your audience can be your best allies when it comes to telling stories that excite and capture the audience's interest: 'The eyes, chico. They never lie'. This will help you connect with your audience. Knock their socks off!

List / Process

I’m an awesome subtitle, ideal for giving more context about the topic at hand

We are visual beings

We can understand images from millions of years ago, even from other cultures.

Narrative beings

We tell thousands and thousands of stories. ⅔ of our conversations are stories.

Social beings

We need to interact with one another. We learn in a collaborative way.

List / Process

I’m an awesome subtitle, ideal for giving more context about the topic at hand

We are visual beings

Narrative beings

Social beings

Digital beings

We avoid being part of the content overload in the digital world.

We need to interact with one another. We learn in a collaborative way.

We tell thousands and thousands of stories. ⅔ of our conversations are stories.

We can understand images from millions of years ago, even from other cultures.

Una presentación genial…

• Mejora la comunicación sobre cualquier tema
• Hace 'match' con tu audiencia...
• Y les hace formar parte del mensaje
• Tiene un color adecuado a su tema
• Representa datos con gráficos
• Utiliza timelines para contar historias

Insert a video

Text + icons

Although you shouldn’t overuse bullet points, icons and diagrams can be your best allies when telling stories. You’ll hold the attention of your audience and the information will be imprinted in their brains.

Generate experiences with your content.

It’s got the Wow effect. Very Wow.

Measure results and experiment.

Activate and surprise your audience.

Text + icons

Generate experiences with your content.

Measure results and experiment.

It’s got the Wow effect. Very Wow.

Activate and surprise your audience.

Make sure your audience remembers the message.

It’s ordered, hierarchical, and structured.

Audio

If your content is interactive, it’s engaging.

Visual aids help convince the audience because they facilitate the acquisition of knowledge.

It is essential to check everything thoroughly. Don’t let any typos slip through!

The tone is usually formal and the vocabulary technical, so bear this in mind when drafting.

The tone is usually formal and the vocabulary technical, so bear this in mind when drafting.

Embedded content

Social Network

Map

Music

Interactive question

Conclusions

- Genially

‘Your content is good, but it’ll engage much more if it’s interactive.’

A great presentation ...

• is clear and structured.
• tells stories hierarchically.
• connects with your audience.
• matches the fonts and colors to the topic.
• includes images and entertains.

Describe the problem you’re going to resolve and, above all, the reason why your idea is interesting

Don’t forget to publish!

+ info

Lack of effective communication with MISO control team

No real time energy insights

No Seamless process

High level problems

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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Did you know?

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

• 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

Pain points

• 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