About the project
Self-service as the default
Illumia had no owned digital channel where customers could manage their energy contracts on their own. Every interaction, from checking a bill to updating a supply address, went through customer support: cost pressure on operations, frustration for users who expected an always-on self-service experience.
The platform had to serve a single-home customer and a property manager with many concurrent contracts inside the same product, with navigation that needs no onboarding and consumption data transparent enough to build trust in a market where opaque billing is the most common complaint.
01
Listening before drawing
Building from scratch meant no usage data to lean on, so the requirements had to come from the people who would use the platform. I ran qualitative interviews with three distinct profiles, from residential single-contract users to property managers with several sites, plus a competitive benchmark of Italian and European energy providers. Instead of asking what features people wanted, we mapped the tasks they were already doing by phone, email or manual workarounds, and the friction in each.
The findings became four principles: self-service first, multi-contract by default, radical billing transparency, and responsive without compromise. They governed every decision that followed.
02
A structure that holds at any scale
I mapped the full information architecture across six primary sections: Home, Supplies, Bills, Energy consumption, Documents and Support. A vertical side navigation keeps orientation persistent, and a bento-style home dashboard puts the most frequent tasks one click away; any section is reachable within two interactions regardless of contract complexity.
The same structure serves someone managing a single home contract and a property manager overseeing supplies across different sites, without special modes or separate flows. One contract or ten, same clarity.
03
Clarity as a trust mechanism
The design system aligns with Illumia's brand: bold red as the primary action colour on a clean white UI with generous whitespace. It prioritises clarity even at high data density, with high contrast, consistent iconography for supply types, semantic colour for status states, and a component library that scales without visual drift. In a product handling account and billing data, visual consistency builds trust; it is not decoration. The interface is fully responsive, because payment status and bill notifications live on the phone.
After launch, the architecture proved it could support one to ten-plus concurrent supply contracts without degrading, support contacts dropped for information available in the platform, and the key flows, paying a bill and checking consumption, got measurably faster.
Results
- support contacts
- -35%
- concurrent contracts, same clarity
- 10+
- interactions to reach any section
- 2