ENERGY · ENTERPRISE SaaS · GOOGLE PARTNERSHIP · 2025–26
Opening a previously inaccessible market to smaller energy consumers by transforming small energy reductions into market-ready offers that created a new revenue stream while helping balance the national grid.
SUS score — 5 users
Estimated annual value opportunity
Press outlets - Valor Econômico, IT Forum and more
Axia's Innovation Award
MY ROLE
Product Discovery · UX/UI · Validation
TIMELINE
10 months
TEAM
Product Designer · PO · Google
SECTOR
Energy · Enterprise SaaS · Regulated
CONTRIBUTION
End-to-end Product Design
Context & Opportunity
THE MARKET
THE GAP
THE OPPORTUNITY
Why This Matters?
WHAT IS DEMAND RESPONSE?
When electricity demand peaks, utilities must either build expensive new infrastructure or pay existing users to temporarily reduce consumption. Demand Response is the latter: a flexible, cleaner way to balance the grid.
WHY IT MATTERS
Prevents blackouts. Cuts carbon emissions. Avoids billions in infrastructure spend.
WHY IT’S HARD TO DESIGN
Users have no prior mental model. The product must teach a market and build trust with real money at stake.
THE CHALLENGES
B2B SaaS for a regulated, high-stakes industry — where clarity is a competitive advantage.
Discovery & Research
Doing desk research, stakeholders interviews and benchmarking international systems, we made invisible parts of aggregation legible — and reframed education and transparency as core product features.
KEY INSIGHT 01 — VOCABULARY GAP
“Most users did not know what Demand Response was.”
→ Education is a product feature, not a support document.
KEY INSIGHT 02 — AGGREGATION IS INVISIBLE
“Users couldn’t understand how their capacity connected to others.”
→ Aggregation must be visual, not numeric.
KEY INSIGHT 03 — TRUST BEFORE ACTION
“Users needed full visibility into incentive calculations before committing.”
→ Transparency and simulation are non-negotiable.
Design Decisions
They became the basis for me to build consistent screens using Figma, bringing real value to the users and still be aligned with business goals.
DECISION 01 — Embed education into the experience
PROBLEM
Users had no mental model of Demand Response.
INSIGHT
Education must live inside the flow.
DECISION
Use contextual explanations at every key choice.
OUTCOME
Concept comprehension rose sharply in testing.
Exploring decision in wireframes before crafting the final screen
Disclaimer: the company went through a full rebranding during the project. I worked with both engineering and design system team to redesign the interfaces. That's why the brand looks different in the wireframes.
Trade-off: the biggest part of user education was built inside Axia's official website. The team built a dedicated page once we understood that, in the marketing plan, this would be users first touchpoint. Big numbers of the program, Q&A and an educational video addressed the insight.
DECISION 02 — Make aggregation visible and tangible
Small reductions combine into one meaningful market offer - Axia is the aggregator of them all. We also showed the offer rules of pricing, scheduling and limit to cancel an offer. This also works as education, exposing how regulation works.
Validation
Through usability tests supported by AI Notes (Copilot), we got into relevant results.
SUS — Excellent range
Participants
Session type using Maze
Tested flows
Business Impact
An entirely new revenue stream from a previously inaccessible market.
FINANCIAL IMPACT
Estimated annual value opportunity exceeding R$1M — a new revenue stream from a previously inaccessible market segment.
Annual value opportunity
Business model
In Brazil
Engineering partner