NOVA Power & Gas – a digital solution for one of the most reputable players in the Romanian energy industry.
Bill & utilities management app
The Project
NOVA, a key power and gas provider in Romania, wanted to digitalize its services offering and articulate a more convenient and seamless experience to the clients it has been serving since 2007.
Services provided:
Business Analysis & Tech Advisory
Mobile App Development
Product Design
Launch and Maintenance
The Challenge
The idea was to design and develop a user-friendly app that people could access to carry out tasks like accessing their utility bills, paying them, or sending their indexes, without the hassle of traveling to the physical offices or the high levels of bureaucracy that come with that.
They contacted us to redesign the interface of the already existing web app and cover the end-to-end development of the mobile platform.
Because momentum was key in migrating the business to the online environment, we had to deliver on a strict deadline.
The challenge was not conforming to it, having already cultivated an efficiency-oriented work ethic internally, but synchronizing with the 3rd party API, in charge of the backend development, to maintain the pace we set on to keep initially.
Our Approach
Knowing that we had to bring both the client and the 3rd party collaborator on the same rhythm as ours, we took a proactive approach in structuring the workload in weekly sprints, enforcing our internal agile mindset externally.
In doing so, we have provided consultancy throughout the entire product development process, creating an environment that stimulated dynamic teamwork between all the 3 parties involved in the project.
Product Design
The overall goal of the design process was to create a seamless and intuitive user experience.
We started with the discovery phase, where, together with the client, we have defined the main problem that this digital solution was going to solve.
Next, we carried out a series of informal user interviews, addressing people from a variety of demographics a series of questions concerning their current experience with power & gas providers, as well as their desired means of utilizing such services.
Having established a foundation to support our software development process, we then proceeded to define the user scenarios, followed by the user flows and the wireframes.
The main dashboard was the core of our design process, it was where the user had to have, on a first glance, a full overview of the app’s most important features.
Product Development
While for the web version we only touched upon revamping the UX and UI, for the mobile platform we covered the end-to-end development process, from product design to development, quality assurance, user testing, launch and maintenance.
Having gone through the buyer persona defining process within the product design stage, we then set on to prioritize the key features which both the digital/web and mobile solutions had to contain:
A centralized dashboard containing the past and current bills; a payment system; an option to input the gas & energy indexes.
The mobile app was built in React Native as it allowed cross-platform development.
This meant that we only had to designate one team, writing a single piece of code that could be rolled on 2 different operating systems, iOS and Android, saving us resources, but more importantly, saving the client crucial time.
In two months, the app went live.
“Their team’s available, responsive, and organized. They stay on top of their responsibilities throughout each sprint to meet our deadlines. Their team exceeds our expectations.”
Ligia Paraschivescu, Marketing & Comms Manager, Nova Power and Gas.
Launch and maintenance
Launched in November 2020, the app can be found on both App Store and Google Store.
In just a week after officially launching the app in stores, more than 1000 people have downloaded it. This was a positive reaction from the market which reinforced NOVA’s position as part of the leading gas & energy providers in Romania.
Soon after this launch, a series of new features were implemented. Some of them were:
The option to filter the bills; a referral system; push notifications (to remind the due fees/bills, as well as inform about upcoming promotions).
The partnership with NOVA kicked off in September 2020 and, to this day, it is still maintained and expanded by the RebelDot team.
Following this successful project, the team at NOVA contracted us to develop another important part of their system, respectively the CRM.
