British Gas: Optimizing Smart Home Management Through UX Design
Energy and home services provider
In the rapidly evolving smart home market, British Gas has positioned itself as an industry leader through its innovative Hive ecosystem. Behind the seamless customer experience of managing home energy and smart devices lies a sophisticated approach to information architecture and user experience design, powered by Optimal's comprehensive research platform.
By leveraging Optimal's capabilities, British Gas has revolutionized how customers interact with their smart home technology, creating intuitive interfaces that simplify complex energy management tasks.
Challenge: Simplifying the Smart Home Experience
British Gas faced a significant challenge in creating an accessible and intuitive dashboard for their Hive smart home application. As the functionality of their smart home ecosystem expanded to include heating, lighting, security, and energy monitoring, the complexity of the user interface increased proportionally.
The company needed to ensure that users of varying technical abilities could easily navigate the application while maintaining the sophisticated functionality that power users demanded. Additionally, British Gas needed to validate design decisions across multiple iterations, both with internal teams and in collaboration with their design agency, Wolff Olins.
Solution: Data-Driven Design Through Optimal
British Gas implemented Optimal's platform to address these complex design challenges with precision:
- For their customer-facing Hive application, British Gas conducted extensive tree testing through scenario-based assessments. This approach allowed them to evaluate how effectively users could navigate through common smart home management tasks, including adjusting heating schedules, monitoring energy consumption, and controlling connected devices.
- The company also performed several audits of their primary customer-facing dashboard, both independently and in collaboration with their agency partner Wolff Olins. These audits provided critical insights into how users mentally organized smart home functions and their expectations for dashboard layout and hierarchy.
Results: Metrics That Matter
British Gas's strategic use of Optimal's platform delivered tangible results:
- The scenario-based tree testing revealed specific navigation pain points within the Hive app, enabling British Gas to restructure key pathways that increased task completion rates and reduced customer support inquiries.
- By conducting multiple IA audits on their dashboard designs, British Gas gained crucial insights into information hierarchy preferences, allowing them to create an interface that balanced visual appeal with functional efficiency.
- The collaborative testing with Wolff Olins identified opportunities to streamline the dashboard experience, resulting in a simplified yet powerful interface that accommodated both new and experienced users.
Supporting Long-Term Innovation
British Gas's investment in user experience continues to deliver sustained benefits:
- Their iterative testing approach has established a continuous improvement cycle for the Hive ecosystem, ensuring that each update enhances rather than disrupts the user experience.
- The insights gathered from tree testing have strengthened their understanding of customer mental models around smart home management, informing product roadmaps with user-centered perspectives.
- Their collaborative approach with Wolff Olins demonstrates how agencies and internal teams can use shared research tools to align on design decisions, accelerating development while maintaining design integrity.
British Gas's case demonstrates how sophisticated UX insights transform smart home applications from technical utilities to intuitive management tools, directly impacting customer satisfaction, product adoption, and ultimately, market position in the competitive smart home landscape.
Want to learn how you can get started gathering meaningful user insight with Optimal? Reach out to us today.
