From Insight to Impact: Growing tadoº premium subscriptions

Background
CONtext
tadoº offers an energy-efficient smart solution for home climate control.
The company aims to provide additional premium features to boost app subscriptions. Before I joined the project, tadoº had launched Energy IQ, a tool designed to empower premium users by enabling them to monitor and manage their home heating expenditures.

My task is to enhance the value of Energy IQ in order to attract more subscribers.
Approach
  • User Research - analysed current user comments and conducted 8 user interviews to validate my hypotheses and gain qualitative insights.
  • Workshop facilitation - gathered the team to converge the idea with biggest opportunity & risks.
  • Design and develop - applied research results and designed several experimental solutions.
  • Evaluate and analyse - usability testing & in-app fake door testing to inform next steps.
Results
5X
starting free trial
5% more
subscribers
Project detail
Define
User research
To generate solutions, I began with understanding the actual problem. I reviewed our app's comments and reviews to identify potential barriers preventing users from utilizing the current feature. Two key opportunities were identified:

Onboarding -
Not everyone is familiar with electricity consumption; the graph and consumption volume can be challenging for an ordinary person to interpret and take action (17%).

An consumption graph image of the current app

Historical data -
Users said they want to see yearly, monthly and daily day.  (15%)

With the data provided above, I formulated the following two research questions and conducted eight user interviews to gather qualitative insights:

1. What specific information do users struggle to grasp in the graph view, and how can we assist them in better understanding it?

2.Will providing estimated consumption data in monthly/yearly views enhance the value of this feature, as users have suggested?

Findings
I synthesized interview data and identified that users with varying levels of engagement with their heating consumption also exhibited distinct interactions and information needs.
Be insightful
  • A brief summary is sufficient and can offer users peace of mind.
  • Ensuring the information is actionable
Be supportive
Fulfilling users’ WHY would increase the value of Energy IQ
  • Save Money - Providing advice on heating behavior vs. cost.
  • Be Balanced - Ensuring comfort without energy waste.
  • Go Green - Assisting in informed decisions for energy-saving investments.
“ Gives me more control - I need to be more careful, need to put more into my credit to cover that. Or just good to know.”-user interview p5
User journey mapping
I mapped out our user journey of using Energy IQ to facilitate Opportunity-Solution workshop with PMs, developers and data scientist to diverge on solutions with everyone’s ideas.
WOrkshop facilitation
Method - Opportunity solution tree Workshop
  • My Role - Facilitator & Moderator
  • Participants - Product Manager, engineers and data analysts
  • Format & Tool - Online workshop with Miro
Why this method?

Before the workshop, we had an ideation workshop together with the team, we had diverge lots of different ideas, by using opportunity solution tree workshop we can -
1. Agree on the priority
2. Focus on one opportunity at a time
3. Solve the root opportunity

We gathered together to agree on the root opportunities
Prioritisation
Being able to agree on the prioritisation was the key to align with the team and have the workshop outcome actionable.
We continued the workshop and ended with agreeing the impact and effort of each idea
New concept and prototype

Based on the workshop outcome, I designed a prototype for users testing to validate our hypothesis

Hypothesis
We know we are right when
User would understand the information
When users express words like “yes, that make sense."
When ask users “how easy or difficult is the information to you.” User would rate 1-2 out of 5 (very easy)
User would feel stressed if they see a red arrow of their consumption
When users express negative emotion or words
User would value the YoY comparison data

User would find the action useful

When ask users “how would you feel if you could no longer see this page?” At least 80% of users would be “very disappointed”.
When users express words like “yes, that’s what I need”
The comparison for the current month is the top priority information to provide
When ask users what would be the most important information to you, users would answer the comparison of current month
Non-premium users will be interested in upgrade their membership from this feature
When we use this feature as a pay wall we will see the conversion rate will increase 3% compared to previous content

We conducted testing with eight existing users to gather feedback for the next iteration. For the final hypothesis (marked in pink in the table above), we employed a fake door test to acquire additional quantitative data to validate the feature.

Fakedoor test
Results
The test results were significant, we increased 5 times more click through for users unlocking the feature and starting the trial and increased subscription rate 5%, reaching 25%.

By applying a user-centered approach, we enhanced the efficiency and effectiveness of product development, while simultaneously mitigating the risk of wasted development efforts.
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