BC Home Energy Planner
Turning a complex energy system into a homeowner decision experience
The BC Home Energy Planner is a government-backed, province-wide service that helps homeowners understand their home's energy performance and make informed decisions about improvements.
Built on Properate’s existing energy modelling platform, I helped transform an expert-oriented system into a homeowner-first experience—from understanding a home’s performance to deciding what to do next.
Service Design Lead (0→1)
Product strategy · Service design · UX · Interaction design · Prototyping · Usability testing · Delivery
5.6M users · Province-wide launch
Government · CleanBC initiative
July 2023 – Present
Challenge
Turn that expert-oriented capability into a self-service experience homeowners could understand and act on.
What to keep?
What to simplify?
What to rethink for a homeowner-first journey?
Transformation
From an expert-facing assessment platform → to a homeowner-facing service.
From multi-user system → to a homeowner-first entry point
From technical outputs → to actionable decisions
From insights → to rebate-aware, real-world next steps
A different audience, a different balance
Properate’s existing platform needed to serve both homeowners and energy professionals. Its direct path to energy insights and upgrades made sense for users who already knew what they were looking for.
For the Planner, we were designing for homeowners who might need more context before deciding what to do—but we couldn't add guidance at the cost of making the experience feel slower or more complicated.
Get me to relevant upgrades quickly
Help me understand what I'm choosing
This became our first design tension:
Finding the balance
I considered how to provide context without turning the questionnaire into a learning exercise.
With little context
Users may not understand what they’re being asked.
With much context
The questionnaire becomes harder to scan and complete.
My decision: Designing the questionnaire around two needs
I kept the question as the primary task, while introducing contextual guidance alongside it.
Question—primary task
Clear question, instructions, and answer choices.
Context—supporting guidance
Explanations, examples, and visuals that help users understand unfamiliar concepts.
This led to a split-screen pattern: the question remained the focus, while relevant educational content was available alongside it without sending users away from the assessment.
Primary task (on the left): Clear question + instructions + answer choices
Contextual guidance (on the right): Explanation + examples + visuals
The split-screen layout allowed users to access context without leaving the flow or interrupting the task.
The trade-off
I deliberately accepted some additional visual density in exchange for giving homeowners more confidence at the moment they needed to answer.
The goal wasn't to give users more information—it was to make the right information available at the right moment.
But making information available wasn't enough.
In the first version, the contextual guidance was presented through a relatively subtle “Learn more” treatment. During testing, users often overlooked it.
The problem wasn't that the information was missing. It simply wasn't noticeable enough.
If users don't notice the guidance, its value is effectively zero.
So rather than adding more educational content, I focused on making the existing guidance easier to notice and understand.
From “Learn more” → to contextual guidance
V1 — Easy to overlook
A lightweight prompt made the information available, but didn't give users a strong reason to engage with it.
V2 — Clearer and more useful
Added a visual background and a contextual card with a short explanation, making the guidance more noticeable and useful before users decide to expand it.
I changed three things:
More visible
Gave the explainer enough visual weight to compete with the primary task.
More specific
Replaced generic “Learn more” language with a title directly connected to the question.
Progressive disclosure
Provided enough context upfront while keeping deeper information behind “Expand.”
The trade-off
I gave the explainer more visual weight, accepting a denser interface so users would actually notice the guidance.
The goal wasn't to add more information.
It was to make the right information noticeable when homeowners needed it.
Tension 02 — How do we make a complex system feel simple?
My role was to decide where that complexity should live: in the interface, or in the system logic behind it.
A — Don't make users understand identity rules
When a system requirement becomes a user problem
The original flow didn't explicitly ask for a middle name.
When the authentication requirements changed, we needed to collect users' full legal names, including middle names where applicable.
Instead of treating this as a simple form-field addition, I iterated on how the requirement should appear in the experience.
Three iterations
V0 — No middle name
⬇︎
V1 — Combined
⬇︎
V2 — Explicit
What changed
V0 — No middle name
The original form was simple, ⚠️ but it didn't capture the full legal name required for authentication.
V1 — Combined
I first incorporated middle names into the existing first-name field to preserve the compact form structure.
⚠️Testing showed that users could still overlook the requirement.
V2 — Explicit
I separated middle name into its own field, making the requirement visible at the exact moment users needed to provide it.
The trade-off
I deliberately accepted some additional visual density in exchange for giving homeowners more confidence at the moment they needed to answer.
Fewer fields
Identity clarity
More explicit requirement
I accepted a slightly longer form to make an important authentication requirement harder to miss.
The challenge wasn't collecting more information—it was making the requirement clear enough to act on.
Impact
Users were able to decide what to do next more quickly.
More users continued and completed the remaining steps.
Outcome
The redesigned overview reduced decision friction and helped returning users confidently move forward.
B — Don't make users understand system states
Returning users
Once authentication was handled, another question emerged:
What should a returning homeowner see when they come back?
The system knew exactly what state they were in. The user didn't.
Oringinal design:
4 destinations 1 decision
All four destinations were valid, but users had to figure out which one matched what they wanted to do next.
The design shift
Instead of exposing every destination at the same level, I reorganized the experience around what users were trying to accomplish.
The top level became intentionally simple, while the system handled the branching underneath based on the user's previous progress.
From destinations to intentions
We redesigned the experience to guide returning users toward the most relevant next steps, reducing decision friction and making actions easier to prioritize.
Introduced a structured overview to replace multiple equal-weight actions
Grouped related actions (report, plan, updates) into clear sections
Added contextual prompts to highlight what may need attention
Established a clearer visual hierarchy to guide user focus
The trade-off
Everything is visible at once
Guided hierarchy
Users choose an intent first
I traded immediate access for clearer prioritization—keeping the same destinations while changing how users encountered them.
The added layer gave users fewer decisions to process upfront without limiting what they could access.
Impact
Time to First Action
Users were able to decide what to do next more quickly.
Questionnaire Completion Rate
More users continued and completed the remaining steps.
Outcome
The redesigned overview reduced decision friction and helped returning users confidently move forward.
Tension 03 — How do we move users from understanding to action?
Our original hypothesis — Progressive disclosure
I intentionally separated the Report and Plan to gradually introduce complexity—helping homeowners understand their home before asking them to think about upgrades.
Quesionnaire
→
Report
Understand
→
Motivations
Personalize
→
Plan
Decide
→
Rebates
Act
But the journey created an unexpected stopping point
Report
Understand
→
stopping point
Motivations
Personalize
→
Plan
Decide
Testing showed that some homeowners reached the Report and stopped there.
The Report answered their immediate questions, but didn't always create a clear reason to continue.
The product goal wasn't just understanding
Understand my home
→
Choose an upgrade
→
Get a rebate
→
Improve my home
Then: Challenge the original model
Report
What is happening?
→
separate experience
Plan
What should I do?
Understand
→
Diagnose
→
Decide
→
Act
The trade-off
Easier to digest
Clearer stages
Risk of stopping
Continuous momentum
Stronger continuity
Clearer path to action
Potentially denser experience
Separating the experiences made the journey easier to digest, but created a boundary between understanding and action.
The merged direction brings those stages closer together while keeping the experience structured through a clear information hierarchy.
Ongoing evolution
I'm currently exploring this merged model with the team. The goal isn't to show everything at once, but to make the progression from understanding → decision → action feel like one continuous journey.
Key Learnings
Clarity is not the same as simplicity
Simplifying the interface isn't always about showing less.
It's about making the right information impossible to miss.
Good hierarchy reduces decision friction
When multiple actions are valid, the role of design is not to remove choice—but to make the path through those choices clearer.
A successful journey needs to connect understanding to action
Progressive disclosure can make complexity easier to digest—but if the next step feels too far away, users may stop before taking action.
“ The pilot program has been tremendously successful, validating its value to homeowners, and granting us important opportunities for us to improve the tool prior to its provincial launch. ”
Brett Auger
BC Home Energy Planner Project Owner