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Smart energy meters and in-home displays

Smart meters measure how much gas and electricity you’re using via a remote connection to your energy supplier. They come with an in-home display screen to help you see how much energy you’re using and whether you can reduce your energy consumption.

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By the end of March 2020, a total of 15.5 million smart meters were operating in homes across England, Scotland and Wales. By the end of 2024, every home and office in Great Britain will have been offered one – a total of 50 million gas and electricity meters provided to 27 million homes and offices.

The problem

Public opinion

If you've checked the news in the past few years you are highly likely to have seen bad press about smart meters, a quick search produces hundreds of articles. Common attitudes include:

 

  • It doesn't save you money

  • I find it confusing

  • It causes me anxiety

  • I don't really see the point

  • I just don't care enough

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Obviously if the smart meter programme is to be a success these attitudes need to change. How do you prove to the country that the smart meter rollout hasn't been a waste of time and money?

Existing devices

When your energy provider installs your smart meter they are required to provide you with a free in-home display. As these displays are coming directly out of their profits they have have a huge incentive in making them as cheap as possible, and little interest in providing features or customer benefits.

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How do you convince energy companies to spend their money on a more expensive, but potentially more compelling device?

Trio IHD

Our solution

Disaggregation - Provide users with a breakdown of their energy data separated by appliance in their home. A solution unique to smart meters

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  • Smart meters provide energy data every 5 minutes. This allows us to analyse user's energy usage and extrapolate which appliances were using the energy with up to 95% accuracy.

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  • This solution requires frequent energy data and provides a unique selling point of smart meters, helping to sway members of the public who 'just don't see the point'

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  • Knowing how you use your energy empowers you to find solutions, many people spend over 10% of their bill on devices on standby!

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  • If there is real public interest in the feature energy companies could be convinced to purchase the more expensive in-home device to help win customers

Use cases

  • Help me to understand my consumption and spend and be more efficient

  • Help me to understand the value of smart meters​

  • Help me to know if my consumption is increasing​

  • Help me do more for the environment

  • Help me save money

KPIs

  • Use and engagement

  • Reduction in 'straight to drawer'​

  • Reduced support call-backs​

  • Reduction in 'bill shock'

  • Geo brand awareness

  • Customer brand awareness

Success looks like

  • 10% increase in app uses

  • 10% increase in active IHDs after 3 months

  • Reduction in energy usage after 3 months for people who engage with disaggregation feature

  • 10% increased visits to geo website

  • 1000 visits to customer disaggregation websites

(Numbers changed for confidentiality)

Preliminary research

White paper and case study review

Delta-EE energy insights

Without access to customers for research we had to rely on existing third-party research and white-papers for our preliminary findings. Fortunately smart meters have received a lot of attention over the past few years, resulting in a number of high quality studies about both disaggregation and consumer opinion of energy as a whole.

Collating our findings

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Some of the findings from our research:

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  • Attention span - Most people are sufficiently curious about energy to at least look at their smart meter once it has been installed. But unless it tells them something useful and actionable they quickly lose interest and never come back

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  • Misleading information - If you've had a smart meter installed you may have been asked to boil your kettle to see how your energy use changes. Kettles are something that most people have in their home and they use a lot of power so it seems like a good example. However, kettles are only using power for a few minutes so even an extreme tea lover will see their kettle use less than 1% of their bill. This leads many people to make the wrong choices about how to save energy, resulting in little change to their bill and ultimately causing them to lose interest

 

  • What is a kW? - Current in-home devices generally display energy usage in kW, this makes sense as it is how much energy you're using. However people find it extremely difficult to relate to; how much is 2kW? Is that a lot?

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  • Energy usage often isn't in our control - The weather has a greater affect on your monthly bill than any change you can make, but you're not likely to see this explained anywhere. Without this information people quickly become disillusioned when their changes appear to be having no effect

Preliminary research

Turning user pain points into goals

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From our research we identified 5 key pain points for users:

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  1. I don't know what to do about the rising cost of energy

    • This is especially important to prepay customers who are often having to live without heating due to increasing costs​

    • An estimated 2 million more people may have to switch to prepay this yea

  2. ​Insights aren't helpful to me

    • Telling people they are using £20 a month on cooking doesn't help them do anything about it​

  1. The advice is too generic, I need to know what I can do

    • "Turn off the lights when you leave the room" This is the level of current advice, and people are bored of hearing it​

  2. I don't trust my bill

    • As referenced in the previous section, people don't know (haven't been taught) how their energy is used and can find their bills surprising​

    • This is often purely down to the weather, you will probably forget how cold it was last month, but you will be reminded when you see your bill

  3. I don't see the value in having a smart meter

    • Smart meters have been sold on vague promises of saving you money, but the truth is without a change in behaviour you won't save anything by having a smart meter​. There have been many news stories about this and people are rapidly losing interest

Goals

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Turning negatives into positives, we created a list of goals to keep our further research and UX grounded:

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  • Turn looking into the in-home display a habit - Our key goal, existing IHDs suffer from an extreme drop-off rate and we need to make sure people see the value in coming back to the device

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  • Help prepay users - With more and more people switching to prepay it is important our solution works for all energy users

 

  • Make advice feel personal, keep advice new and interesting - Users need to feel the device is tailored specifically to them, rather than providing advice they can find anywhere

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  • Create value for energy providers - Ultimately this product is only a success if energy companies want to buy it

Competitor analysis

What can we learn from competitors?

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As this is a fairly new technology there aren't many competitors in the space, however we can learn from those who have attempted similar products in the past.

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Common problems

Perhaps unsurprisingly, previous products in this space are all guilty of contributing to the pain points found in our research, common problems include:

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  • Difficult to related to units - kW, tonnes

  • Unrealistic advice - "Go on holiday less"

  • A heavy for focus on graphs - Research shows that graphs are difficult to understand and people will often not take the time to understand them

  • No accounting for seasonal changes - The largest contributor to energy use is the weather, ignoring this makes all other advice virtually useless

  • An emphasis on carbon - Most people these days will have heard of carbon emissions and carbon offsetting, the only problem is that lowering energy use does not necessarily lower carbon use. This is extremely unintuitive and requires too much explaining for the average user

What do they do well?

To find examples of information presented well we looked outside the energy space and into best-in-class examples from other sectors.

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The apps, websites and emails shown above all have a common theme, large amounts of information presented in a digestible and interesting way, so what can we learn?

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  • Peer to peer comparison - Information is far more relatable when compared to others around you

    • "You spend £5 a month on cooking" is fleetingly interesting, but unactionable

    • "You spent £5 a month, this is less than 90% of similar homes" provides the missing context

  • Provide immediate feedback - Don't wait until the end of the month to tell the user something, your advice may no longer be relevant and is less likely to be actionable​

  • Sharable data - Can we provide data that people will want to share on social media?

    • If we can get people to start talking about energy saving, there is a much higher chance of positive change​

  • Reassuring users - Can we provide reassurance to users they are doing well?​

    • Prior research showed people are not fond of gamification, but is there anything else we can do?​

  • Don't make it hard work - Do not require constant interaction with the device, people are busy and will quickly stop if you take up too much of their time​

UX Design

UX proposal

The first UX proposal explored different ways of presenting disaggregation information to the user. The first image below shows app design, the second IHD design.

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Once a range of designs had been produced they were compared against our goals and research to choose what we felt were the best designs. These designs were then tested by a small group of users.

User testing

We recruited 20 users that fit our target demographic to provide feedback on the initial UX designs. These users were shown a clickable demo and asked a series of questions to assess how easy the UX is to navigate and understand. Our key learning objectives from this research were:

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  • Understand pain points of first time user flow

  • Are there any barriers to entry

  • Find out if the menu and general navigation are intuitive

  • Find out the usefulness of pop-ups for first time users

  • Does the new energy format convey information at-a-glance better than the dial?

  • Understand the most important element for pre-pay customers

  • Determine the usefulness and ease of set-up of disaggregation

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Feedback

The key takeaways from the user testing were:

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  • 90% of users were able to understand what the disaggregation screen was telling them without any prompts or additional information

  • All users thought the information was interesting

  • However all users also felt that without additional advice and insights, the feature would only hold their interest for a short time

  • Users had no idea what a kW is

  • "This is cool", IHD had a cool factor that their existing IHD did not

  • There was still a lot of scepticism. While all users left the testing interested in the product, they mostly entered it feeling that smart meters were a waste of time

UX Design

Final UX

Taking everything above into account, a final UX design was produced, combining easy to understand information, meaningful advice and insights and a real differentiator that is only possible with smart meter technology. 

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