As the main electricity distributor in the province of British Columbia, BC Hydro has been providing electricity to the residents in metro Vancouver area since 1961. With the increasing application of clean energy, BC Hydro has become one of the leading companies in promoting zero waste energy. Therefore, BC Hydro decided to launch their own EV charging stations in order to further support this action.
As a leading company in promoting utilizing technology for clean energy, BC Hydro's own EV charger is a major step in committing continuous investment in providing experiences that satisfy its customers in every way. Therefore, the task is to design an experience that is easy, intuitive and smart.
The final design was well-received by BC Hydro. The stations were installed back in Dec. 2019 at Abbotsford, BC, and are planned to be installed more around Metro Vancouver area in the coming years.
The final design includes the EV charger itself and the compatible UI design. The design includes features that aim to bring better experience that corresponds with Metro Vancouver's climate and its citizens background.
Since users are worried about the wet nozzles short-circuiting their vehicles, the design features a double-undercut design to protect the nozzles well from the rain.
Because EV owners aren't interested in spending time organizing the charging cables nicely, we designed the cable rack to have a smaller curve but wider opening structure to make the cable hanging easier.
Since many of the Vancouver citizens come from immigration background and aren't very proficient with English, we deliberately avoided wordy instructions and emphasized on using graphics and animations instead.
Vancouver has longer dark time during the winter, and overly bright screens are difficult to read in dark environments. Therefore all the instructions and information are placed on dark background to increase the visibility of the content displayed.
User Interview
Precedents Study
Competitor Study
Literature Review
EV owners are worried that the nozzles may get wet and short-circuiting their vehicles. Since Vancouver always rains so heavily, wet nozzles become one of their prior concerns.
After finishing charging the EVs, the owners aren't interested in spending the time to nicely organize the cables.
There are many EV owners come from immigration background. For them, wordy instructions are very troublesome to read. They like simple instructions that are easy to understand.
The screens are very bright, and therefore, when the day is dark or when there's no other light sources, EV owners have a very difficult time reading the content displayed on the screen.
Based on the research findings, I started to consolidate the design by approaching it from higher level first and working down to details. I regarded this project as designing a system. I defined the target user persona, and decided the key features by drawing in all the information I collected to this point.
I started off the ideation stage with creating a rough user journey map to help discover design opportunities. The map summarized the main steps that the user will go through during a charging experience. And within each step, I identified the problems the user may encounter.
Under the prioritized problems from the user journey map, combining with the findings from the research, I started to create sketches. After I finished certain amount of sketches, I invited some EV owners to provide feedbacks on my ideas.
Through discussing my ideas with EV owners, and by keeping the design constraints in mind, we were able to decide the features that should be included in the EV charging station system.
Under the prioritized problems from the user journey map, combining with the findings from the research, I started to create sketches. After I finished certain amount of sketches, I invited some EV owners to provide feedbacks on my ideas.
The sketches include ideas about:
⦿ housing structure
⦿ interaction method
⦿ instruction's interface
After deciding the key features of the charging station and getting some rough ideas on the overall design of it, I started to flesh out the details of the station. This includes both the station's industrial design part as well as the UI design/animation.
After defined the features that I wanted to include, I created an information architecture diagram to help me organize the design structure
After we discussed with BC Hydro about their preferences toward the sketches, we moved on to the quick CAD prototypes. Although the chargers are wall-mounted, we still put the individual stands in consideration, in case of any future needs.
A good cable management solution can bring up the entire experience. The main design idea here is to separate the two cables by hanging them on two sides of the charger.
By comparison, even though some of the other cable management solutions integrate the hanger as part of the charger, most of those solutions are based on the single nozzle charger.
I made the wireframe of the instruction to preview the overall layout of the UI elements.
Afterwards, I created several different UI animation samples for displaying the charging status. I showed these animations to the EV owners and received their opinions/ preferences towards the UI design.
Through doing this project, I learned some very important lessons that will benefit me in the future:
During the interview process, I had some assumptions about the information that users may prefer and the ones they don't need. I wasn't even aware that I made this assumption until I already started to test out prototypes. For the next time, I would spend more time on creating a more in-depth interview question lists to decrease the chance of missing important data, and to avoid jumping into assumptions over the aspects I missed out in the interviews.
I was able to greatly benefit from the iterations I did in this project. Not only they visualized the experience part of the station which I could only imagine through sketches and renderings, I was also able to observe the reactions from the users and quickly generate corresponding solutions onsite. I think iterations plus user testing is a deadly combination that a designer must possess.