Revolt aDmin 2.0
At Fastned, a leader in building a network of fast-charging stations for electric vehicles powered by renewable energy, I played a lead role in transforming our internal platform. The previous system, Revolt, managed everything from station-level operations to customer experience but became outdated as the company expanded.
Roles and responsibilities
Project Name: Revolt Admin 2.0
Duration: 1.6 years ( Mar 2022 - Dec 2024)
Role: Lead Designer
As the lead product designer for Revolt Admin 2.0, I led the design and research to replace this system, streamlining workflows to position Fastned as an industry leader. Over the course of 1.6 years, I conducted in-depth user research, identified pain points, and collaborated closely with the product manager, engineers, and operations teams to define the MVP and align with both business and user needs. Additionally, I developed a new design system to support the platform’s implementation and set a higher standard for internal management.
DEFINING THE PROBLEM
As Fastned expanded its stations, chargers, and partnerships, the old platform struggled to handle the increased data, leading to slower performance and fragmented information. Initial discovery sessions with stakeholders highlighted three key improvement areas for the new product, forming the main problem statements to address:
Research & discovery
We follow the double-diamond framework as our primary structure for product development, adapting methods and tools as needed to suit each project. This approach provides flexibility without rigidity, enabling continuous discovery and ensuring alignment with user needs.
OUR users
Our main user groups are Customer Operations, Field Operations, and Network Operations. Customer Operations handles customer issues, Network Operations maintains the charging system, and Field Operations ensures all chargers function optimally, working with both groups to deliver the best charging experience.
User Research & Stakeholder Insights
To understand our users, I began with workshops, interviews, and shadowing sessions, identifying the distinct needs of our three user groups. This gave us a solid grasp of their pain points and how they interact with the platform.
Next, we focused on product requirements for this technically complex platform. Collaborating with the product manager, we involved all key stakeholders including engineers to ensure alignment. Using the product trio approach, we maintained a balanced perspective on design, technical feasibility, and business goals.
DATA & INSIGHTS
We gathered qualitative data through workshops, interviews, and weekly feedback sessions with each user group. For quantitative insights, we employed tools like UserPane and Datadog to identify and prioritize pressing issues, ensuring user needs guided our decisions.
We used the Mixpanel report to see the page views and user behaviour in the previous months for a number of internal users. From this, we can divide the pages into two groups: High impact and low impact features.
Inbound support tickets show the moving average of contacts per reason. We can see quite clearly where we should prioritise first.
Learning & prioritization
We visualized all our findings with an opportunity tree to keep stakeholders informed.
Combining our research with data, we identified key opportunities for improvement. Using the RICE model, we worked with the product manager and engineers to prioritize initiatives, applying the MoSCoW method to focus on impactful solutions that were easy to implement. Before moving into the delivery phase, we aligned these priorities with stakeholders to ensure team-wide agreement and clarity.
MoSCoW method to focus on impactful solutions
RICE Method with PM and engineers to prioritize initiatives
Design Process
Ideation & Brainstorming
The opportunity tree (by teresa torres) was our central tool, providing visibility into our findings and helping us prioritize as we moved forward. We began ideation with whiteboarding sessions that included stakeholders, the product manager, lead engineer, and users, ensuring that we transformed opportunities into viable solutions that balanced business, technical, design, and user perspectives.
Wireframing & Prototyping
After gathering ideas, I created low-fidelity wireframes and conducted review sessions with users to collect feedback and iterate. Prototypes were essential in helping users visualize the solution. Although time-consuming, this process was valuable. Once the team felt confident in the solution, I advanced to delivering high-fidelity designs based on the design system.
During the discovery phase, close collaboration occurred between the product manager, back-end engineer, and users. As we moved into the solution phase, the front-end engineer joined the team to ensure a comprehensive approach.
Design Systems
Building the design system from scratch without a clear product vision posed challenges. We often added new components on the fly, necessitating the revamping of existing components from both design and code perspectives to ensure agility and accommodate various scenarios. This process required strong collaboration between the design team and front-end engineers.
Challenges
OUTCOME
We aimed to enhance three key areas: findability, accessibility of information, and efficiency. The new Revolt platform improved user experience and functionality, leveraging insights from discovery and continuous user feedback.
Global search
A global search feature enabling users to efficiently locate information across the platform’s five main entities, accessible from any page, ensuring speed and relevance.
Table filter & selective data display
Selective data display tailored to user needs, complemented by comprehensive table filters for faster data retrieval.
Pinning system & additional data panel
Incorporate pinning and saving options for filtered data to ensure users have essential information readily available. Additional relevant details can be stored in an always-accessible side panel, maintaining a clutter-free interface while providing comprehensive access.
The old platform’s prolonged loading times disrupted workflows. With Elastic search and a redesigned information architecture, pages now load instantly, with information logically organized for efficiency.
Implement advanced search technology to optimize data storage, focusing on retaining only what is necessary, unlike the previous platform.
The design system was crucial for these improvements, enabling efficiency by reusing established patterns and creating new ones only when necessary. It ensures consistent patterns across the platform, delivering a seamless user experience.
Stations, Chargers & sessions
All charger-related actions and information, central to the customer charging experience, are consolidated in one place, ensuring seamless workflow navigation.
Utilize charger heartbeats to enhance live graph data and capture all charger events effectively.
Enhance information hierarchy for improved visual clarity and prioritize collecting all technically feasible missing data. Achieving this requires close collaboration with architects and back-end engineers, turning past challenges into new possibilities.
Visualize data wherever possible for easier comprehension and integrate with multiple platforms to enhance data richness.
Takeaway
Future Approaches
We have established a highly efficient discovery and delivery process tailored for our team and products. I’m excited to move on to the next project, confident that our focus on continuous improvement will persist.
In addition to refining our workflows, we now have a design system that will support all future internal platforms, enhancing efficiency in product development moving forward. This foundation gives us great hope for even more successful outcomes ahead.
