AEP designed a mobile app to make themselves competitive with other utility providers. The app lets customers pay their bill, report outages, and monitor their energy usage. 
PERSONAS
Our team selected which of our customer segments we should target with our first MVP release. 
We selected customer segments that traditionally do not engage with our customer websites and have a high tech affinity as a hallmark of their characteristics. 
I developed this persona template for this project that is now the standard for persona work at AEP. 
UX IN AGILE FRAMEWORK
AEP was new to the agile framework at the time of this project allowing us to define how UX should best work within agile.
While the developers were running their sprints the design team created their own board to track work. This helped us stay organized and ahead of the development sprints so that we could keep feeding thoughtful work to the development team. 
UX / DEV FUSION
Frequently it was essential to pull developers into design discussions to understand the technical constraints. ​​​​​​​
The perspective the developers could provide for our work was invaluable. We would frequently have one off flow conversations and periodically would invite the developers to ask questions about our proposed designs through workshops.
SKETCHES
Turning discussions with developers into an experience
for our users. 
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After gaining an understanding of the technical constraints I was able to think through the experience of signing in with biometrics and sketch a flow. 
WIREFRAMES
All of the existing business processes for AEP had to be translated to a mobile app experience. 
After gathering information on how those processes were set up we could then begin to design what that experience looked like in the mobile app channel. They were then usability tested to validate the design decisions that were made. 
USABILITY TESTING
As the lead UX designer on this project I established a testing cadence as part of our design sprints. 
It was important to the team that we not only test for usability of the product we were developing, but also the accessibility. We contacted an employee in our building who is visually impaired and asked if he would be willing to participate in our accessibility study. 
A/B TESTING
There were two competing designs for the outage reporting flow that we tested extensively.
There were several A/B studies conducted on this report outage flow as the results continued to be inconclusive. Each time I would adjust the design based on what I learned from the previous tests and try again until I landed on a design I felt confident with. 
This is the final report outage flow that performed well for iOS and Android platforms. 
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