Building Trust in a Category Nobody Loves
Nobody opens a utilities app by choice. I designed for the one minute a month they do.
the setup
Direct Energy Canada had a trust problem wearing the mask of a product gap.
A US-Canada system integration had caused widespread login failures, forced password resets, and flooded the call centre. NPS was in rough shape. Customers were stuck managing two separate logins for regulated gas and competitive electricity - a consequence of how the business was structured, not how people actually live. The digital touchpoint they were left with was a web portal built before UX was a discipline.
The brief was to build a mobile app. The real job was to rebuild the relationship.
what i found
I ran nine user interviews with web analytics layered on top, and the picture that came back wasn't what we expected.
Customers weren't logging in just to pay and leave. They were staying, trying to make sense of their bills, questioning charges, wondering why costs kept climbing month to month. That wasn't apathy but a signal that people genuinely cared about their energy costs and had nowhere useful to go with that curiosity.
The core insight: bill comprehension and usage visibility mattered more than login frequency. The best version of this app wasn't one customers opened every day. It was one that was exactly right for the one minute a month they actually needed it.
That reframed the entire scope of what we were building - less a payment utility, more a platform for rebuilding customer trust.
what i did about it
Two early calls shaped everything downstream.
The first was scope. The original brief was wide. I pushed to cut it to the essential journeys - pay bill, get support, manage account, auto pay, sign up for services - and defer everything else. That decision is why we delivered a month early.
The second was feature prioritization. Biometric login became a priority (of course almost every app in 2026 now has it), but our reasoning for its priority was because we already had users unable to access their accounts and having to reset their passwords due to a backend migration that affected users' login credentials. On top of that, asking someone to remember a password every time they access an essential service is a trust failure before the app even opens. Bill comprehension became a core feature because the research said that's where customers felt most lost and where we had the most to prove.
[Process artifact: IA diagram or feature parity comparison table]
Both decisions traded feature breadth for trust, clarity, and reliability.
what it took
I led four designers across 35+ user journeys. One was in-house, three were contract, so that meant sprint planning had to be tight.
A month into the project, I caught a misassignment. The contract designers I'd put on creative exploration work were actually strongest at rigorous systems thinking and edge-case coverage. I restructured their assignments around that, and the quality of the work reflected it. The team delivered a month early.
Cross-functional reviews ran across Product, Marketing, Legal, Compliance, Billing, Customer Care, and Engineering simultaneously, with Legal and Compliance holding final sign-off before any dev handoff. That meant designing for feedback loops rather than just designing for handoff. Not everything went smoothly - timely stakeholder feedback wasn't always guaranteed, and edge cases surfaced after flows were already complete. But the process structure absorbed those moments without derailing delivery.
what it became
The app launched without paid marketing and reached 15,000+ downloads in the first month and 50,000+ by June 2026.
In that month-one, 87 customers signed up through the app - 57 brand new to Direct Energy, and 30 existing customers who upgraded from a regulated to a competitive energy plan. Cumulative sign-ups reached 454 as of June 2026 (297 acquisition, 158 transition).
The sales journey I designed converts at 8.49%, against 5.65% for the equivalent web journey.
As the smallest market in the NRG portfolio, Direct Energy Canada was the proving ground for whether mobile could work as an acquisition channel at all, and the early results gave the broader NRG group a model worth replicating across their own markets.
Beta testing scored 4.4/5 for satisfaction, with biometric login and bill comprehension rated highest, which confirmed the research calls. The redesigned information architecture tested 54% easier to use than the control (n=51).
Public ratings sit at 4.5 on iOS. Post-launch monitoring flagged a loading performance issue, and a skeleton state solution is currently in development.
At the enterprise level, the app became the first mobile acquisition channel across the NRG portfolio - validating mobile as a conversion surface in a business that had only ever treated it as a retention tool.
