Soukarni Barai
UX Researcher | Service Strategist | Designer
How might we increase EV Adoption in Italy?
KEYWORDS
USER RESEARCH | CONCEPT GENERATION | SERVICE-SYSTEMS
CONTEXT
As the whole of Europe aims to become Net Zero, Italy seems to be having very low adoption of electrification and switching to greener modes of life. This project identified the slow adoption of EV cars and wondered why citizens of Italy were finding it difficult to make the switch. We discovered that affordability and weak infrastructure contributed to this. We proposed a new centralized consulting service system EVNOC to make Electric cars more affordable and accessible for Italians.
KEY STAGES
- Desk Research to find the cause and effects leading to low adoption.
- Expert interviews to better understand the systemic barriers for citizens.
- We identified opportunity areas and dived deeper into Italy's culture.
- We generated ideas and evaluated them to finalize our concept.
- We mapped the service offerings and ecosystem including its lifecycle.
- Designed the UI/UX of the service and depicted its larger impact.
OVERVIEW
CHALLENGE
-
Electric vehicles have limited range and there's a scarcity of charging stations, causing "range anxiety" for users.
-
Compared to other EU nations, Italy is slower in adopting EVs.
-
To meet changing customer demands, we must create an ecosystem that integrates products, services, and experiences.
METHODOLOGY
-
We used the Tangity Design Methodology for this project.
-
Cause and effect map for prioritization.
-
Interviews with 5 global automobile company employees and 4 Italian industry experts to understand electrification in Italy.
-
Empathy Mapping and Cognitive Behavior Therapy tools were used to explore user pain points.
-
20 ideas generated and evaluated using Responsibility Diamond.
-
Built Service Offering Map, Process flow, and Business Model Canvas to develop the concept.
-
Additionally, a System Map was created to understand the wider impact on other systems connected to EV systems.
MY ROLE
Our team had 5 members, including me.
-
I took a leading role in conducting research and interviews.
-
I coordinated and planned teamwork.
-
Since there were no end users to interview, I suggested using Empathy Mapping and Cognitive Behavior Therapy tools.
-
Additionally, I helped my teammates create a business-ready pitch deck, including digital and physical ideas for presentation.
DURATION
2 weeks
May 2023
BACKGROUND
This classroom project was developed during the User Research and Concept Generation Workshop at Poli.Design, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. It was conducted and guided by Tangity- part of NTT Data.
PROCESS
This project was guided by the Tangity Project Process and all the tools and design methodology used was devised by the Design Team from Tangity.
Design Director Emanuela Cozzi, Antonio Grillio, Chaidi Gargareta and Garon were our advisors and guides through this entire process.
DESK RESEARCH
In the first phase the team conducted an extensive research on the EV industry to identify where the key problem areas lie. We framed various questions to structure our research:
1. What is EV/ Electric Vehicle? What types of EV Cars exist?
2. What is the electric grid system?
3. Who are the Actors of the EV Ecosystem?
4. What are the key factors of EV affecting adoption in Italy?
5. Why are people not choosing EV?
6. What are the Italian Car Purchase Behaviors?
7. What does an Italian user seek in a car?
8. What other systems get affected if EV gets adopted? (MACRO lens)
9. What are the various statistics of EV adoption currently?
10. What is the EU Net Zero Goal?
We collected our learnings and made sense of it together in the form of a Cause and Effect Map to summarize our understanding.
Positive Medium Negative
INTERVIEWS
The desk research made us curious to know more about the industry and larger systemic perspective of the EV and Electrification Systems in Italy. To resolve this we had a two pronged approach.
-
Global View
We conducted 5 short qualitative interviews with automobile experts in different automobile organizations from different parts of the world.
The questions we asked were:
-
What are your thoughts on EV transition in your country? and in Italy?
-
How is your government promoting energy transition?
-
Are there any brands/ manufacturers who are supporting the energy transition? Can you share examples?
-
What are the pros and cons of enabling citizens to create own energy? Explain why.
-
How do you think we can enable citizens to generate, store and share energy? Ideas or Examples
-
Do you have any inspiring stories of EV adoption to share with us?
.png)
.png)
Hover over logos to see the questions we asked
-
Expert View
We questioned a panel of 4 EV and Electric Industry Experts from Italy who helped us understand the Italian electric ecosystem and electric mobility issues in Italy.
The questions we asked were:
-
What really are the benefits of EV? Wont it cause a battery shortage?
-
How will battery shortage after EV adoption affect Italy?
-
How to address the Italian car market which is a luxury car manufacturing hub?
-
How cost effective is a fully EV Car in Italy? Long term value?
-
Loss of jobs due to shift to EV manufacturing, is that being addressed?
-
From an Infrastructure point of view, how easy is it to store and use electric energy?
-
Why is the charging ecosystem so fragile at the moment in Italy?
-
Energy distribution systems, is it fully privatized + or owned?
-
What policies are available for EV car owners and why aren’t people encashing it?
Hover over profiles to see the questions we asked
BARRIERS TO ADOPTION
We understood that currently there are 6 key barriers to adoption:
1.
Not Value for Money
2.
Bad Electric Vehicle
Charging Infrastructure
3.
Limited Energy Crisis Awareness
4.
Energy distribution has limited control
5.
Lack of trust in technology
6.
Range Anxiety of Electric Vehicles
How might we increase trust in Electric Vehicle technology for Italians to increase adoption?
OPPORTUNITY AREA
EMPATHIZING
Once we had identified our Opportunity Area we dived deeper into the pains of our users. As an urban citizen in Italy, what was really the cause behind the lack of adoption. We combined Empathy Mapping and Cognitive Behavior Therapy tools to reach the root cause of our problem. This also helped us to arrive at the focal point of our approach and desired behavior changes that we wanted to create.
IDEATION & EVALUATION
Once we fully understood our approach we spent our time in Ideation and devised our concept statement of our solution. This solution was further evaluated with the help of a responsibility diamond.
CONCEPT:
EVNOC is an end to end service platform to match users to the most affordable and sustainable EV cars according to their personal needs,
For environmentally conscious Italian citizens,
to make EV cars easily accessible,
Because switching to EV cars is expensive and mentally overwhelming.
Hover for idea evaluation via Responsibility Diamond
SERVICE OFFERINGS
Our service concept was then further developed. Its primary offering was expert consultations for supporting an affordable transition to Electric Vehicle Car Ownership.
The 4 ways in which this consultation supported the users are:
1. Support user in comparing Total Cost of Ownership of new EV's
2. Connect second hand EV sellers and buyers
3. Provide solutions for upgrading old ICE cars into Electric engines
4. Connect to EV Long Leasing dealerships
The service also offers car monitoring and maintainance options through its Smart Maintainance tab to provided all round support for electric car ownership.
Set your car and budget
preferences
Find the right match with our expertise
Smartly Maintain your car post purchase
Scan the QR Code to access our Figma Protoype of the app
DEVELOPING THE ECOSYTSEM
Once we had our offerings ready we built the
1. Service Offerings Map
2. The As is process of our service
3. Business Model Canvas of our Service System.
This was followed by developing the System Map of the larger ecosystem our service would be present in.
You can click to zoom in and read all the maps that were created.
SYSTEMIC IMPACTS
User Behaviors
If our service became a reality we imagine large scale impacts on various other our systems that our directly and indirectly related to our service system.
Positive Domino on other systems
EVNOC App Activities
Macro Impact at policy and planet scale
FEEDBACK
"Soukarni showed a good understanding of the challenge and an openness to embrace the design process throughout the workshop stages. She is a good listener; she communicates with clarity and seems capable of challenging the norm and leading with admirable ease in her team. Her organisational skills and collaborative behaviour were apparent throughout the whole workshop."
- Antonio Grillo, Emanuela Cozzi, Chaidi Gargareta, Jinlong Yu (Tangity Team)
FELLOW TEAM MEMBERS:
Sahachart J., Surabhan P., Navni G., Naikang D.
All project findings are property of the team members and the
Poli.Design, Politecnico di Milano, Italy 2023.