EV Charging Management System
Designing the dashboard for Property Managers to control and monitor their electric chargers.
Challenge
How can we help administrators manage their EV charging systems more effectively and give them insights into their use?
My Role
Project Type: Web Design
Role: UX/UI Designer, Research Lead
Tools: Figma and Zeplin
Client: Lectrium
Timeline
Oct 2023-May 2024
Understand
Context
Lectrium is a management system that installs the OCPP compliant systems. Their current business model involves setting up the charging systems for commercial and multi-family residencial parking lots. With these charging systems installed, property owners need a system to control these charging stations.
Lectrium challenged our team to design a dashboard which can facilitate property managers supervise and monetize their EV chargers.
Problem Statement
As they expand into new markets, property managers need tools to control, monitor, and monetize these EV charging stations.
To support this, Lectrium challenged our team to design a Charging Station Management System (CSMS)—a dashboard for property owners and managers to:
Supervise and manage EV charger usage
Set pricing models for different user groups
Track energy consumption and usage patterns
Maintain long-term customer relationships
This platform would also serve as a handoff tool for Lectrium’s internal development team, allowing them to scale their offering while giving control back to property partners.
Business Goal
The Lectrium team introduced us with their full-service platform for EV home charging with a mission to make every home EV-ready and to expand their business goal and maintain a long term Customer realtions, they tasked us to design a CSMS system, a dashboard which can be used by Propert managers or can be turned over to the development Lectrium team to control EV chargers and monetize this service by setting user groups and charging based on user patterns.
Research
Insights
Through user interviews, community listening sessions, and research, we uncovered a few powerful truths:
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Lack of identifying the pronouns and sexual orientation leads to mistrust.
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Users are hesitant to seek medical care due to lack of inclusive environments.
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Unable to share the mental struggles and experiences to seek proper treatment.
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Users find it difficult to find doctors in their local areas who are vetted to their needs.
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Most of the users are not informed of the ongoing research studies and new treatments.
Design
Ideating features from insights
Based on our insights and understanding the user needs from interviews, we priortized the most-needed features.Then we outlined these features in screen flows required for our product build.
Onboarding
Dashboard
Live View of the usage, revenue and charger status
Report view of users, profits, metrics of usage over a period of time.
Troubleshooting errors remotely
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Onboarding
Once signed up for Lectrium service, administrator fills up the site and charger details, create user groups and assign cost and timings.
These settings can be edited later if required through “Manage” bar.
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Live Dashboard
After onboarding, the dashboard shows
the metrics highlighting Revenue, Energy Used and Number of Sessions.
the graph shows the peak usage hours over the course of the day.
the status of the chargers, current user and the duration of the session.
ability to control power settings for charger.
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Troubleshoot
The dashboard alerts the managers about the errors in chargers on site, shows the details of the faults. “Reset All” troubleshoots the systems and resolves the errors remotely.
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Chatbox
A fixed chat box button on dashboard connects the property managers with Lectrium Team. The messsage window pops up with preset prompts to initiate the conversation.
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Report View
Reports shows the historical data of last 12 months giving insights into
Energy usage, Profit and Revenue
ability to toggle between users and ports to check the details of each session.
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Lectrium Admin View
This dashboard is only viewed by the Lectrium team gives an overview of all their clients and properties.
Validate + Iterate
Testing
User Feedback
We conducted two rounds of usability testing to evaluate the user experience, identify issues with complex flows by observing their behavior and reactions to it. We gave them 4 tasks to complete to test the intuitivity and understanding of the flow of the task. The testing data includes the task success, time spent and easiness rating of the flows.
Lectrium Team's Feedback
Since Lectrium is one of our user, we took their feedback and insights to add new features and understand the task priortization . They guided us to have a flow back to the settings through dashboard screens to ease the managers add or edit the property and chargers details.
Onboarding
Feedback
This dashboard is only viewed by the Lectrium team gives an overview of all their clients and properties.
Iteration
This dashboard is only viewed by the Lectrium team gives an overview of all their clients and properties.
Avg. Success
Avg. Task Time
100%
66s
43%
47%
Live Dashboard
Feedback
Users felt overwhelmed by all the information.
Users felt the need to get an insight of high occupancy hours.
Iteration
Priortized information on the top of the page for quick access.
Occupancy by hour graph added.
Avg. Success
Avg. Task Time
100%
10s
20%
29%
Navigate Reports
Feedback
Difficulty navigating to report view.
Long scrolling to look for users data.
Iteration
Toggle button created to switch to "Report View" from "Overview" on nav bar for visual hierarchy.
Toggle to switch between "users" and "ports" data.
Avg. Success
Avg. Task Time
100%
16.5s
25%
15%
Adding new charger
Feedback
Users assumed "Add/Edit" button to be used for page editing.
Iteration
'Add/Edit" label changed to " Manage" and moved to nav bar with a dropdown menu.
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Avg. Success
Avg. Task Time
100%
5s
22%
10%
Reflection
Next Steps
We presented our designs to Lectrium Team and they were impressed by our work. We are glad to be part of their business model and our designs will impact the property managers.
We outlined a few next steps for success.
Interview property managers to get high level information on data metrics to be presented on graphs.
Conduct usability testing for Admin view .
Develop Responsive design.