EnBW Relaunch
EnBW is one of the most important German energy suppliers and for many people in Germany the number one source of gas and electricity. The company wants to transform itself: from a pure basic supplier to an innovative service provider that is a leader in topics such as renewable energy and electromobility.
| Role | Design lead, interface design, prototyping, icon design, illustraton |
| Client | EnBW |
| Year | 2018 |
A gentle, agile transformation
Instead of being a pure energy provider that only covers the basic needs of its customers, EnBW wants to become the partner for electromobility and renewable energies in the future. Many of these topics were already in the portfolio of EnBW, but were never treated as main products. That was about to change.
The process of transforming a company is a complex and lengthy process. EnBW followed the approach of transforming itself step by step, unit by unit. Together with EnBW we have formed several agile teams. Instead of updating the entire product portfolio at once, we worked on certain core topics such as solar energy and electromobility in small iterative steps.
In short sprint intervals, we were able to quickly achieve results that we published immediately. In this way, we can collect real customer feedback and react immediately.
First steps
In order to test whether innovative topics beyond the basic service are accepted by customers, we first published simple, interactive landing pages. We covered topics such as electromobility, solar energy and thermal insulation.
Products like installing solar panels in your home are complex and so far customers have had to take care of the entire process themselves, from planning and product selection to installation and commissioning. EnBW wants to help its customers by taking care of the entire ordering and installation process and providing interactive planning tools that make the product configuration transparent and understandable. As a first stept those planning tools were published on dedicated landing pages.
Homepage update
After the team gained first experiences with the new design direction, we redesigned the homepage. The challenge on the homepage was to pursue conversion-driven goals as well as to communicate the new, innovative product fields.
We developed a teaser mechanism and a conversion module, which we first built and tested as prototypes. For the homepage alone I developed three HTML prototypes, with which we checked different teaser transitions and the responsive behavior.
Infographics
An interesting side project for me were infographics, which were needed for the website as well as for other divisions of the company. We developed two illustration styles for EnBW: a stylized, realistic representation of product systems and a simple, easy-to-use isometric visual language.
Design System
A relaunch of this size can only work with a solid design system. Frontify was used as CMS, which allows a flexible handling of components.
Each developed component can be used on any page and can be combined flexibly.
Impressions
This project is probably the project where I learned the most about Scrum and digital transformation. The team was agile-skilled, had the backing of the management and worked according to the motto “fail fast, fail early”.
I have been working in EnBW’s offices for over a year and a half, we had an incredibly good time and I hope that EnBW will succeed with its transformation.
