Energy & utilities · B2C · Design stewardship
Design stewardship across a utility service ecosystem
Long-term design stewardship within a regulated energy and utilities environment
How is coherence maintained across a multi-year service ecosystem?
This case study examines three years of design stewardship within a large-scale digital transformation program for an energy and utilities provider. It focuses on maintaining coherence across services over time, adapting a shared design system to local constraints, and sustaining system integrity amid regulatory, organizational, and market change.
Rather than a single redesign, the engagement took the form of sustained responsibility for system health across platforms and initiatives. The work illustrates how design creates long-term value in regulated environments by aligning services, teams, and decisions around a shared logic that can evolve without fragmentation.
Engagement overview
What this was, at a glance
Between 2017 and 2020, I worked as a lead product designer within a strategic partnership supporting the digital renewal of ELMŰ-ÉMÁSZ, Hungary’s largest electricity and gas provider at the time. At its peak, the company served approximately 2.2 million residential customers, making usability, clarity, and operational efficiency critical at every touchpoint.
The engagement unfolded over multiple years and initiatives, beginning with the renewal of the corporate brand site and expanding into a broader consumer-facing ecosystem. The work took the form of sustained design stewardship across platforms, services, and organizational boundaries.
The scope of work included the renewal of the corporate brand site, the public electric car charging network (e-Mobility), the residential solar solutions platform (enHome), and a conceptual redesign of the online customer service experience.
Evoluting the product
How the work unfolded
The work did not follow a linear redesign model. Instead, it evolved through repeated cycles of discovery, synthesis, and delivery across services with shared constraints but different user needs.
Extensive discovery and UX research formed the foundation of each phase. This included stakeholder and user interviews, domain and regulatory analysis, collaboration with contact center teams, and hands-on exploration of legacy systems. The aim was to surface customer pain points, compliance requirements, and technical feasibility before proposing structural or interface changes.
Rather than treating each surface as an isolated product, design decisions were made with the broader ecosystem in mind. Patterns validated in one context informed others, allowing the system to gradually converge toward a shared logic across brand, interaction, and content.
Over time, this approach shaped several interconnected service areas, including the corporate brand site, the public e-Mobility network, the enHome solar platform, and a comprehensive online customer service concept. Together, they formed a coherent service vision rather than a set of standalone redesigns.
Objective & outcomes
Why the work existed
ELMŰ-ÉMÁSZ operated a wide portfolio of digital services that had grown independently over time. While functionally robust, the customer experience was fragmented across channels, interfaces, and mental models. Users encountered different navigation structures, terminology, and interaction patterns depending on which service they accessed.
The objective was to establish experiential coherence without oversimplifying the underlying complexity. Design needed to support regulatory compliance, scale safely to millions of users, and reduce reliance on high-cost support channels, while remaining adaptable to organizational and market change.
Over time, the work contributed to clearer service boundaries, improved customer self-sufficiency, and a shared design direction across sub-brands that could scale back into the corporate platform.
Contextual challenges
What influenced the work
Designing for a national utility provider introduced a distinct set of constraints. Regulatory requirements dictated information hierarchy and interaction depth, limiting how content could be structured and surfaced. Data protection rules constrained error handling and support flows, particularly around authentication and account access.
At the same time, services were owned by different business units with varying technical foundations and priorities. Market conditions added further uncertainty, as the European energy sector underwent structural restructuring during the engagement. Within this environment, progress depended on pragmatic decision making, alignment across silos, and designing systems resilient enough to remain valuable as circumstances shifted.
Role & responsibilities
Why stewardship mattered
Across the three-year engagement, my role extended beyond individual project delivery into sustained design stewardship across multiple consumer-facing services. I held end-to-end responsibility for UX, UI, and information architecture, while shaping shared design principles that could operate across platforms, sub-brands, and regulatory contexts.
A central aspect of the work was maintaining system integrity over time. This included adapting and extending the Innogy SE design system to local regulatory, service, and content requirements, while preserving alignment with a centrally governed European framework. Design decisions needed to account for feasibility early and remain consistent across initiatives, ensuring that local adjustments did not fragment the broader ecosystem.
The role required balancing negotiation with clear ownership of design outcomes. By addressing constraints upfront and holding agreed decisions steady, the work supported long-term coherence across services rather than short-term, isolated optimization.
Post-delivery context
What changed over time
During the final phase of the collaboration, structural changes in the European energy market significantly altered the operating context for ELMŰ-ÉMÁSZ. As part of a broader reorganization, the company exited residential energy services, and in 2021 approximately 2.2 million customer accounts were transferred to a different provider.
This shift brought further development of the online customer service platform to a close, despite the redesign being completed and prepared for usability testing. While the release did not proceed, the work clarified a coherent service vision and influenced internal direction during a period of organizational change.
Insights & takeaways
What this work revealed
This engagement demonstrates how design creates value when scale, regulation, and longevity intersect. Impact emerged not from individual launches, but from maintaining coherence across services as organizational and market conditions shifted.
One key insight was that long-term systems require active stewardship. Without clear guardianship, design intent degrades incrementally through well-intentioned local decisions. Sustained responsibility for system health made it possible to build services that remained usable, consistent, and resilient over time.
Over the course of the collaboration, the work gained visibility beyond the immediate engagement. Insights from the program led to interviews, conference talks, and public discussion within the design community. This period significantly shaped my professional trajectory and established my reputation around enterprise-scale design stewardship in regulated environments.