Commodity Trading UX Design

Background

Praxent engaged in an iterative redesign process for the customer-facing portal of a major energy provider in North America. Their team dug into the client’s culture and goals to deliver quality designs.

The project was completely successful, overhauling the appearance and user flow of the portal and enabling a large-scale expansion of its features planned by the client. The Praxent team was thoughtful and flexible throughout, responding to all requests quickly and taking all feedback into account.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the head of business development, product strategy, and corporate strategy for the retail arm of an energy provider for industrial customers and consumers in the United States and Canada. We provide commodity services including electricity and natural gas.

In addition to providing a solutions-based approach to our customers energy consumption needs, we also have a trading arm that is active in the wholesale power and gas markets across the United States and Canada

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Opportunity / Challenge

What challenge were you trying to address with Praxent?

We have an internally built customer-facing portal where our customers access data that’s related to their energy consumption and a few other tools. That portal needed to be overhauled in terms of its UX/UI to make it a little easier to use and a little more intuitive.

We were planning a larger brand evolution and wanted to get that out of the way before we started a larger strategic expansion of the platform itself.

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Solution

What was the scope of their involvement?

Even though the platform itself was homegrown in terms of its functions, we worked with Praxent to really dig into and help us understand the psychological effects of the design and technologies that we were using, as well as how those were affecting the human interactions being driven through the platform.

We have a fairly unique position within the market, so their first task after we brought them on was really to try to understand our customers, and the from there they were able to take our existing platform, perform a true heuristics evaluation, and break down how it needed to be redesigned in a lot of different ways.

It was an in-depth, iterative process, so they would send us wireframes and we would offer suggestions from across our business to try to incorporate as many perspectives as possible. Then they would take our feedback and come back with more wireframes, and that would continue until we had a product that we were all really pleased with.

What is the team composition?

I worked with the designers and evaluators directly, but since the design was so technically focused, our IT team was closely involved in cooperating with them as well.

How did you come to work with Praxent?

I found their team on Clutch, originally. The platform was incredibly helpful as a starting point for that search because I was just able to Google UX and design consultants and then look through different companies’ ratings.

Our North American operations are based in Houston, so when I saw that Praxent operated in Austin I was pretty excited about them because it would allow us to meet with them in person pretty easily if necessary. They participated in an RFP with two other companies, but they really stood out throughout the whole process.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our work together lasted from July 2019–January 2020, which was our intended length for the project.

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Results & Feedback

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

They dug into both our work and our culture in order to provide a more thoughtful redesign of our platform, and that effort really paid off in the product that we got in the end. We were incredibly pleased with the work that they delivered, in large part I think because it reflected their dedication to our account and their desire to stand behind the quality of the final product.

How did Praxent perform from a project management standpoint?

In my 3 years at EDF, I haven’t worked with a more responsive third-party vendor than Praxent. They’re not just responsive, they’re proactive, which was an incredible benefit to the engagement as a whole. They would come to me anticipating potential issues that we were able to tackle beforehand because of the thoughtfulness of their engagement.

There was a lot of open and honest feedback back and forth provided by both of our teams which really made us feel like partners together more than just parties in a transaction. Praxent also has a very organized, methodical method of tracking budgets and milestones that really sets them apart from other consultancies and helps them to keep everyone in the engagement satisfied. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I think the most noteworthy thing that I found about working with Praxent is that they really listen to what you have to say. Most similar companies tend to pressure their clients into doing what they think is best by arguing that they’re the experts so you should listen to them, but their team understood that understanding what we do was the key to doing their job better. The flexibility and iterative process enabled by their culture made the whole project enjoyable from start to finish.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I honestly don’t have any negative comments on the engagement. They came in way under their forecasted budget, were on time with everything, and were always flexible, so we have nothing to complain about.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure that no matter what you’re looking to do with Praxent, you’re open to having them come in and really understand your business. Our organization was really open to the effort that we were undertaking, so we had buy-ins from stakeholders across the business, but without that, it would have been much more difficult to establish the level of consensus of opinions that made our engagement with them as successful as it was.