Overview

In July 2023, BT Group announced that its start-up and digital incubation team, Etc., had begun conducting technical and commercial pilots to convert or upgrade street cabinets into electric vehicle charging units. These pilots provided critical insight into the viability of scaling EV charging across BT's estate.

Evve Charge was an app that helped EV owners across the UK find and compare chargers, and through EV sync delivered personalised information tailored to each driver's needs. The app was piloted in East Lothian.

Analysis

67% of UK drivers feel that the current public charging infrastructure is inadequate. This lack of sufficient charging facilities creates range anxiety, making consumers hesitant to switch to EVs—despite the environmental and cost benefits they offer.

Improving the charging network and expanding accessibility is essential to drive widespread EV adoption in the UK. Through early user interviews, we identified four key pain points:

• Having to use multiple apps to find chargers
• Payment methods not integrated
• Charger status often unreliable
• Uncomfortable sharing vehicle data

These became our primary focus when designing the experience.

Prototype

We wanted to keep our process lean to iterate fast. Our approach was to create early concepts and test them in moderated sessions with small groups of 5-10 users, gather feedback, fix issues, and repeat until we had the right solution.

Prototyping was key, it let us validate ideas quickly. We built our prototypes so that component updates would inherit changes by default, cutting down time spent on maintenance.

Highlights

• 🏆 Receive CES Innovation Honouree Award
• 👨🏻‍🔬 Conduct over 45+ user labs, 5+ surveys across 2000+ people.
• ⚡️ Accelerate the UKs Road to Net Zero by removing barriers.
• 🔋 Deploy the first end to end charge point connected to BT cabinets into the ground.
• 🔌 Setting up evve charge testbed.
• 📰 Coverage in Financial Times, Telegraph, Business Green, BBC Radio, Router.
• 🌍 Working across 5 different time zones.