A seamless experience across the electric vehicle customer journey — built to grow the charge network and increase demand for zero-emission vehicles.
Electrify America was building out the largest open DC fast-charging network in the United States. The app is where that network meets the driver — finding a station, knowing whether it will work, plugging in the right connector, and paying for it.
The opportunity was to marry the complex requirements of multi-platform design with Electrify America's business goals and sustainability objectives — a redesign that had to serve first-time EV owners and daily commuters from the same screens.
I worked as Product Designer across research and design, alongside product design, research, content design and engineering counterparts. My work covered:
Four principles held the work together: consistency, clarity, accessibility and reliability — the last one mattering most, because a charging app that is wrong about a station strands someone.
We ran a competitive analysis on onboarding and sign-up conversion across the category, then interviewed users of the legacy app. The recurring theme was not the charging itself — it was the uncertainty around it.
“I could use more information on where the charger is.” — Brian, legacy app user
That fed a first-time user journey map and a set of personas built from the primary and secondary research, which we used to decide what the redesigned app had to answer before a driver ever left the house.
The map is the app. Pins resize responsively by zoom level so a driver scanning a region and a driver hunting a specific block get the same legibility. The station search card moves through collapsed, half-up and full states, letting someone go from glance to full station detail without losing the map behind it.
Connector confusion was a real failure mode, so chargers are identified with 3D icons of the actual plugs — modelled in Rhino 3D — rather than abstract labels. Accessibility of charger recognition was validated through A/A testing.
Around the session itself: a custom notification system for charge progress, session summary surveys to close the feedback loop, and membership plan options covering Pass, Pass+ and premium offers.
Typography, map pins, buttons and session states were documented as a modular design system for the internal team — the same reason the Vimeo work needed one, at a point where the product surface was growing faster than any one designer could review.
The premium offerings page needed a hero vehicle that didn't exist in photography, so I modelled an electric sedan in Rhino 3D, textured it in Cinema 4D and refined it in Photoshop.
Between 2020 and 2021 annual charge sessions grew from 268,000 to 1.45 million — an increase of more than 500%. Over that period the network delivered 41.4 gigawatt-hours of energy, avoiding roughly 5.7 million gallons of gas, while Electrify America reached 5.2% market share of new EV sales in the United States.
The app itself became the 27th most downloaded app in the Navigation category, holding an average rating of 4.2 out of 5.