Tidewater EnergyClimate tech2024

Making home energy feel personal

A mobile app that turns smart meter data into small, achievable habits, helping households shift their energy use to cleaner, cheaper hours.

Role: Product designer
Timeline: 12 weeks
Team: PM, 4 engineers, behavioural scientist
Platform: iOS, Android

A woman relaxing on a sofa while checking an app on her phone

Outcomes

+52%
30-day retention
-18%
Peak-hour usage in pilot homes
4.7
App store rating

The challenge

Tidewater's first app showed households detailed kilowatt-hour charts that almost nobody understood. Most people opened it once, saw a graph and never came back, even though shifting usage by a few hours could cut their bills.

Talking to households, not kilowatts

We ran a two-week diary study with 24 households, from students in shared flats to retired couples. Nobody thought in kilowatt-hours. They thought in moments: running the dishwasher, charging the car, doing the laundry on a Sunday.

From charts to habits

The redesign replaced dense graphs with a simple daily forecast of when energy is cleanest and cheapest, plus one small suggestion each day. People can plan the week's laundry in a couple of taps and see the difference in pounds and carbon, not units.

A fabric-covered smart home hub on a white shelf in a bright living room — The home hub most pilot households already owned, which the app pairs with in one step.

A “green hours” forecast that fits in a lock screen widget.
Gentle nudges timed to real routines, never more than one a day.
A weekly recap that celebrates progress instead of shaming spikes.

Outcome

Across a 400-home pilot, 30-day retention rose by 52% and peak-hour usage fell by 18%. The app holds a 4.7 rating, and Tidewater is now rolling the experience out to every customer.

What I learned

Behaviour change works best when it feels like a choice. The most effective feature we shipped was also the smallest one: a single suggestion a day.