When E.ON acquired npower, every customer from both brands — 5.8 million people across eight legacy platforms — needed to move to a product built from scratch. I led the UX across landing pages, help centre, onboarding flows, and email communications. None of the customers chose to be there. That shaped every decision.
When E.ON acquired npower, the decision was to replace everything — brand, platform, operating model. The new product would be built from scratch on Kraken Technologies’ cloud-native system. Every customer from both legacy brands — 5.8 million people across eight platforms — would be moved to it.
None of them chose this. That single fact shaped every design decision I made on the programme. Most digital products are designed for people who opted in — curious, motivated, willing to explore. Migration is the opposite: you’re moving people who may already be frustrated, onto an unfamiliar platform, asking them to trust a brand they’ve never heard of. Many had been with npower for years. npower’s Trustpilot sat around 3 stars. Their first experience of the new platform would define whether they stayed or left.
Energy is also a low-engagement category. Research showed consumers spend roughly three minutes a year thinking about their energy supplier. This wasn’t onboarding someone who was already interested. It was designing for someone who wanted the whole thing to be invisible — and making sure that when they did need to interact, the experience answered their anxiety before they had to ask.
The programme involved multiple agencies — R/GA Berlin on brand identity, Engine Creative on campaigns, Not To Scale on character animation, two international research agencies on usability testing — plus an in-house team of product designers, researchers, and content designers embedded in agile squads. My responsibility covered the migration experience across all digital touchpoints: landing pages, help centre, onboarding flows, and the email communication system. The programme launched in early 2020. By March, COVID-19 moved every workshop, research session, and review remote overnight.
Two external research agencies supported the programme. Together, we built user testing into the design cadence as a continuous input — not a validation gate at the end. The critical call was testing migration flows with customers who were actively being migrated, not hypothetical users in a lab. That gave us real emotional responses — real anxiety, real urgency, real relief — at each touchpoint. Three findings fundamentally changed the design direction.
Early help centre prototypes used a standard FAQ accordion: browse categories, expand questions. The first round of testing with actively migrating customers invalidated this pattern completely. They had one urgent, specific question — “has my Direct Debit changed?” — and needed the answer in seconds. They weren’t browsing. They were panicking. This drove a complete redesign of the help centre architecture.
Across every research session, the same three questions surfaced first: “Will my Direct Debit change?” “Will I lose my meter readings?” “Is my tariff still the same?” These weren’t edge cases — they were universal. I used this to define the information hierarchy of every migration landing page: answer these three questions above the fold, before anything else.
The default assumption was that one landing page template could serve both migrating customers and new sign-ups. Research proved this wrong. Someone being moved needs reassurance about what stays the same. Someone choosing to switch needs to understand what’s better. Same brand, completely different information needs, emotional states, and calls to action.
Reassurance beats persuasion when your user didn’t choose to be there. This became the filter for every migration design decision — lead with continuity, not features. Answer anxiety before it’s expressed. Make the change feel invisible.
The first structural decision was to reject the one-template-fits-all approach and design four distinct landing page journeys for four distinct audiences.
Separate migration and acquisition information architecture
Migration landing pages led with reassurance and continuity — “your tariff stays the same,” “your Direct Debit won’t change,” “your meter readings carry over.” The three anxiety questions from research were answered above the fold before any brand personality appeared. Acquisition pages led with value proposition — what’s better, why switch, what you’ll get. Both residential and business versions had their own structure, because a sole trader switching supplier and a facilities manager handling a multi-site contract have entirely different mental models and decision triggers.
This meant pushing back on the product team’s default assumption that one template could serve both audiences. Their argument was efficiency — fewer templates to build and maintain. The research told a different story: a migrating customer who lands on a page full of “here’s why we’re great” messaging doesn’t feel welcomed — they feel like the company doesn’t understand their situation. I rewrote the migration copy with the content team from scratch, leading with the customer’s language rather than ours. The wrong information hierarchy doesn’t just fail to help — it actively damages trust.
I structured each migration landing page to mirror the emotional arc of someone discovering their supplier has changed:
A clear statement that nothing changes immediately. Tariff, Direct Debit, meter readings — all the same. This was the first thing visible on the page, before anything else.
A timeline of the migration process. No surprises. Specific dates where possible, clear “what to expect” language where not.
Most migrating customers needed to do nothing. But telling someone “you don’t need to do anything” is itself reassuring — it resolves the unspoken fear that they’re going to have to fill in forms or re-register.
Only after reassurance, timeline, and action clarity did the pages introduce brand personality and the benefits of the new platform. By this point, anxiety had been addressed. Now was the right moment to make an impression.
The help centre was the second most critical migration touchpoint after landing pages. When something felt wrong — an unfamiliar email, a different-looking bill, a login that didn’t work — this was where people went. The original design followed industry convention: categorised FAQ accordion with expandable questions.
One round of testing with actively migrating customers was enough to invalidate the entire approach.
Search-first architecture over browse-and-expand
Migrating customers weren’t in a browsing mindset. They had one urgent question and needed the answer immediately. I redesigned the help centre around a prominent search bar as the primary interaction, with contextual category cards below (“I need a hand with…”) for people who couldn’t articulate their question as a search query. I also worked with the contact centre team, who shared their call volume data, and restructured the IA around the top 20 customer queries — the questions agents were answering dozens of times a day. Making those self-servable would take real pressure off a team already stretched by the migration volume.
Responsive layouts were mobile-first. On mobile — where most panicked searches happen — the search bar sat fixed at the top, category cards stacked vertically with large tap targets, and article pages used short paragraphs with clear headings so people could find their specific answer without reading an entire page.
The help centre redesign directly reduced call volume for migration-related queries. Every self-served question was one fewer call to a contact centre already under strain. The design had to work under real emotional pressure — for someone who’s anxious, not just someone who’s confused.
Traditional onboarding assumes someone who just chose your product. They’re curious, motivated, willing to explore. Migration onboarding is the opposite: someone discovers a change they didn’t initiate, possibly irritated, possibly anxious, looking for reasons to distrust you. Every template, every subject line, every piece of copy had to account for that emotional starting point.
Modular email system with tone calibration
I designed an email template library spanning onboarding confirmations, billing notifications, account updates, and migration-specific communications across mobile and desktop. The hardest part wasn’t layout — it was tone. R/GA Berlin had created a warm, character-led brand identity built around “positive emotionality.” A playful character works in a welcome email. It doesn’t belong next to a failed Direct Debit notification. Working with the content design team, I defined where personality belonged (welcome flows, celebration moments, empty states) and where it needed to step back (billing, errors, compliance). That framework gave every designer and agency a consistent decision-making tool — removing the subjective conversation each time about whether to use the characters.
I structured the migration onboarding emails around a deliberate emotional arc — from reassurance, through orientation, to engagement:
Email 1: “Nothing changes yet”
Advance notice of the migration. Led with reassurance: tariff, Direct Debit, and readings all stay the same. Clear date for when the switch happens. No calls to action — just information.
Email 2: “You’re moving today”
Migration day confirmation. Reiterated continuity, introduced the app and account, provided help centre link. Warm but not pushy — the goal was orientation, not engagement.
Email 3: “You’re set up”
Post-migration confirmation. Account details, how to log in, what to do if something looks wrong. The “something wrong?” link went directly to help centre search — matching the urgent, single-question mindset we’d observed in research.
Email 4: “Here’s what’s new”
Only after the migration was confirmed and settled did the sequence introduce features and brand personality. Anxiety had been addressed. Now was the right time for engagement.
R/GA’s visual identity was bold, warm, character-led. The question the product work had to answer: what does “positive emotionality” look and feel like when someone’s Direct Debit has just failed?
The answer was a framework, not a rule. I mapped every migration touchpoint against two axes: emotional state (anxious → neutral → positive) and task criticality (informational → transactional → compliance). Where both were positive, brand personality could run at full strength. Where either was negative, personality stepped back and clarity stepped forward. I brought R/GA into this conversation early — they knew where the characters worked hardest, and that input sharpened the boundary considerably. The characters could appear in migration communications, but only in the reassurance layer, never alongside financial information or error states.
A tone framework that scales across teams
Rather than making subjective calls screen by screen, I created a framework that any designer or agency could apply independently. Characters and illustration appeared in welcome flows, empty states, celebration moments, and marketing pages. They stepped back in billing screens, error states, compliance communications, and help centre results. The brand’s warmth lived in tone of voice and the visual system at every touchpoint — it just didn’t compete with utility where utility mattered most. The framework outlasted the programme and continued guiding decisions as the team scaled.
Full personality
Welcome and onboarding flows. First bill paid celebrations. Empty states. Marketing and acquisition pages. The moments where warmth builds affinity.
Personality steps back
Failed payments. Billing breakdowns. Compliance and regulatory comms. Help centre results. Error states. The moments where clarity builds trust.
Satisfaction scores held throughout the migration — not just after. Trustpilot moved from ~3 stars under npower to 4.5 out of 5.
Persuasion, delight, engagement — the standard UX toolkit assumes someone who chose to be there. Migration taught a different set of principles: lead with continuity, answer anxiety before it’s expressed, earn trust through transparency rather than personality. This framework applies anywhere users didn’t initiate the change — enterprise platform migrations, forced resets, service transitions, regulatory changes. The emotional starting point determines the entire information hierarchy.
Testing migration flows with hypothetical users would have told us the FAQ accordion was fine. Testing with people who were actively being migrated — who had real anxiety, real urgency, real questions — overturned that assumption in one round. The gap between “would you use this?” and “can you use this right now, while you’re worried?” is where the most important design insights live.
The strongest moments in the experience are where personality and utility reinforce each other. The weakest were where they were treated as separate concerns. A brand identity delivered as a PDF then “applied” to product screens always produces weaker results than one designed through the product from the start. Next time, I’d push harder for integrated brand-product workshops from day one rather than inheriting finished identity work mid-programme.