EMPOWER, REIMAGINED

Future-Facing Utility Campaigns
& Customer Widgets

UX, UI, Strategy, Interaction Design, Art Direction

TLDR:

I explored a 2–5 year vision for GridX’s Empower platform—the widgets utilities embed inside customer portals powered by GridX APIs. The concept introduced a campaign-driven, segmented widget system for utilities and a personalized, insight-rich experience for customers. I validated the direction with existing personas, interviews, and industry data, built an interactive demo, and presented it to executives. While intentionally future-leaning, the work inspired near-term features in current products and aligned the org around a north star.

Context and Problem

Utilities want to guide customers through complex topics—time-of-use (TOU) rates, EV adoption, solar, and rebates—without overwhelming them. The existing Empower product delivered insights through embeddable widgets, but personalization, orchestration, and measurement were limited.

Core problem: How might we help utilities deliver the right widget to the right customer at the right time—and prove it works—while keeping implementation simple and on-brand?

My Role

As Lead Product Designer, I turned persona and industry insights into a concrete concept, flows, and UI; built an interactive demo; and partnered with PM, solutions architecture, and CX to ensure feasibility, clarity, and brand fit.
Lead Product Designer (IC): discovery → concept model → flows → UI/UX → interactive demo
Partnered with PM and a solutions architect for API feasibility; consulted with CX for messaging

A little research

I synthesized qualitative and quantitative research into a number of problem statements and potential solutions to begin ideating and chatting with internal teams about what's possible. I also identified a couple of constraints to place on the project.
Personas & Interviews: Utility program managers, marketers, and CS teams; residential customers on TOU, EV owners, solar households, and renters.
Quantitative Inputs: Adoption/attrition trends, portal engagement baselines, common drop-offs in rate education, and industry reports on where utilities felt they were underserving customers in clean energy education and activation.
Product Constraints: Must be white-label, API-forward, and low-lift for utility IT teams.

Users and Needs

Utility users—program managers, marketers, and admins—need a simple way to orchestrate campaigns of embeddable widgets, target precise segments (by location, technology, or rate), and keep everything on-brand. They also need built-in measurement to prove impact and iterate quickly on what works.

Utility customers need clear, contextual guidance that demystifies bills and TOU, highlights personalized savings (EV, solar, efficient appliances), and surfaces relevant rebates. Most importantly, they need concise next steps that turn insight into action.

Hypothesis

If utilities can segment and sequence widgets like lightweight campaigns—and customers receive contextual, timely guidance—then we’ll see higher engagement and more program enrollments (EV, TOU, demand response), with lower support burden.
Utility: time-to-launch a campaign; widget coverage by segment; engagement and completion rates; conversion events (rate switch, rebate click, calculator completion)
Customer: clarity (“I understand my bill”); confidence (“I know my next best action”); saved estimates completed; program starts

The Concept

After going through all of the APIs and gaining a deeper understanding of the data and outputs, I put together a demo to show off a happy flow and some of the potential new features for Empower. This began with taking a 1,000 foot view of the information architecture.

Wireframes

Created some very simple wireframes (quickly moved to more hi-fi) and began considering the feature necessary to craft a great experience.

Empower Home

This is the page users would be presented with when logging in to the platform. They have the ability to quickly jump in to making a new campaign, including previews of popular widgets. They can also see some overall campaign insights, and view any active campaigns in a sortable table.

Campaigns

In the campaigns section of the product users are presented with campaign highlights and a sortable/filterable list of all of their campaigns. The list they're presented is based on user permissions and roles set in the admin of the product. From the campaign page users can also choose to create a new campaign, which will launch the campaign creationg wizard.

Campaign Detail

When a user clicks into a specific campaign they're presented with relevant information. This includes the campaign details, where basic campaign and widget information is shown. The embed code for that specific widget so they can easily copy it and send to their IT team. Reporting in a dashboard format that can be exported and shared within their organization. A preview of the widget, with their branding white labeled onto the styling, and an overview of which APIs are being used in that widget.

APIs

Users can dive deeper into the capabilities of each GridX API allowing them to educate themselves about the potential of the widgets, and empowering them to create their own custom widgets.

Widgets

Users can view a library of their own custom widgets, as well as take a look at the library of pre-made widgets to see what might work for their customers.

Final Thoughts

Executive feedback was highly positive. The vision was considered too future-focused for immediate production but directly informed enhancements to current products (e.g., improved targeting options and richer widget analytics).

Sometimes UX isn’t about shipping tomorrow—it’s about making the future concrete so the org can move toward it with confidence. This exploration framed Empower as a campaign-driven personalization system, balancing utility needs (orchestration + proof) with customer needs (clarity + action). The demo aligned stakeholders, sparked delivery work, and set a practical path forward....even if it is a long path.