Client
Volt.
Year
2023
Volt. is a white-label utility app designed for energy providers across the U.S., helping users track bills, monitor energy usage, and manage services from their mobile devices. Inspired by apps like Airbnb and Uber, Volt aimed to bring simplicity and clarity to a space often burdened by outdated UX.
I led product design for the entire ecosystem including the mobile app, marketing site and admin portal, focusing on consistency, usability and brand flexibility.
Note: Some details and images have been recreated to protect IP. More information is available on request.
Scope of Work
User Research & Discovery.
At the project’s outset, we faced a limited budget for formal user research. To work around this, I focused on lean discovery methods and stakeholder-informed UX assumptions, while laying the groundwork for future validation.
What I Did:
Stakeholder Interviews: Conducted sessions with client-side customer support and product teams to uncover common pain points from existing utility platforms (e.g. poor outage communication, unclear billing breakdowns).
Heuristic Analysis: Reviewed 8+ competitor apps, scoring them across usability, accessibility, and visual consistency. Identified gaps in navigation clarity, payment friction, and settings overload.
Persona Development: Created lightweight user personas (e.g. “The Everyday Resident”, “Data-Curious Homeowner”) to guide tone, hierarchy, and decision-making, especially for designing mobile-first flows.
This research helped shape the MVP scope and UX priorities, e.g. making bill payments and outage reporting immediately accessible from the home screen.
Wireframing & Prototyping.
Using Figma, I built wireframes and interactive flows that were continuously validated through stakeholder reviews and developer check-ins.
UI/UX Design for White-Label Flexibility
Volt.’s visual language was built to be adaptable without feeling generic. I created a neutral but modern design system inspired by Uber and Material Design 3, ensuring energy providers could easily apply their own branding. Accessibility was a key focus for this, and we routinely checked to ensure AA compliance.
I tested the colour palette across multiple backgrounds with Stark to ensure compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA standards, achieving a 100% accessibility pass rate for colour contrast and focus states in final QA.
Due to budget constraints, we were unable to conduct external user testing. However, I ran internal feedback loops, and we released the app and TestFlight to gather iterative feedback that we could relay to stakeholders.
Post-Launch Validation
After launch, I generated heatmaps from TestFlight session recordings and Figma prototype reviews to gain a deeper understanding of user journeys.
The heatmaps confirmed that key actions like “Pay Now” and “Sign In” attracted attention as intended, while also surfacing opportunities to improve engagement with secondary areas such as Analytics.
Based on these findings, we:
Redesigned the Payments page, moving Payments above the fold and de-prioritising the Options section so key actions weren’t lost on smaller devices.
Reordered the logged-out options on the Sign-In page, ensuring higher-priority actions were easier to access.
Volt is now in use across the U.S. by leading enterprise partners, the result of balancing white-label flexibility with design integrity, collaborating closely with offshore dev teams, and delivering within tight time, budget and tooling constraints such as Chart.js.
