Fostering User-Centric Energy Flexibility Solutions: GLocalFlex's Service Design Approach

Explore how GLocalFlex employs service design methods to ensure energy flexibility services meet the needs of users. Learn about the project’s process and future plans for user-centred development.

Service design is an approach that has become widely used across both the public and private sectors in recent years. It is an innovation methodology that helps companies create new services and products in a human-centric manner – that is to say, the real needs of users, customers and other stakeholders drive development right from the outset. Service design methods are being employed within GLocalFlex to ensure that the energy flexibility services developed will be both useful and useable for end users and other stakeholders.

In June 2023, GLocalFlex began the service design process by conducting a short qualitative study of potential GLocalFlex users in the town of Wunsiedel, one of the project’s pilot sites. Two VTT designers, Ada Peiretti and Nicolas Kristovic, together with the project’s local partner Gerhard Meindl from SWW, interviewed a number of potential users and other stakeholders. Based on these interviews, a report documenting their insights was released.

Read the Wunsiedel Study here.

In September 2023, a two-day workshop was held at VTT premises, where partners from across the GLocalFlex project collaborated to co-create. Personas (characters) based on the user archetypes defined in the qualitative study were used to seed ideation sessions, leading to the co-creation of a wide variety of possible solutions, features and concepts.

After the workshop, the insights from these sessions were synthesized into ‘to be’ user journeys that describe the possible future GLocalFlex user experience.

The journey maps are currently being used to construct ‘to be’ service blueprints that will also describe the back-stage processes and platforms. These can then become tools for the GLocalFlex project to identify and test key hypotheses related to both the front-stage user experience and back-stage processes and platforms.