FortisBC Mobile App for iOS and Android

1.1M

Customers nationwide

21%

Energy usage in British Columbia

Bright lights

Serving more than 1.1 million customers nationwide, FortisBC is a subsidiary of Fortis Inc, Canada’s largest private utility company. They provide 21% of all energy in the province of British Columbia, and employ around 2,200 employees in their organization.

Recently, their efforts include educating their customers, and helping Canadians manage their energy consumption levels. The new FortisBC mobile app built by TTT Studios acts as a platform for British Columbians to find information on saving energy, pay their bills, be notified of electricity outages, and report a gas leak all from one place.

Built for iOS

Built for Android

Energy saving information

Outage notifications

Gas leak reporting

The challenge

FortisBC needed a robust mobile app that would allow their customers to easily and securely access their accounts online.

FortisBC mobile app bill payments

The need for quality

In addition to its existing website, FortisBC wanted to create a mobile app that would allow their customers to easily access their accounts online. The highest level of quality and security were absolutely critical and uncompromisable due to the confidential and private information that user accounts would contain. The server needed to be scalable so that it could be accessed by the many users in the province. The app also needed to handle a large number of concurrent users without any delays and be easily maintained after development.

FortisBC mobile app electricity outages screen

How we helped

TTT Studios built a secure and accessible mobile application that integrated with FortisBC’s current web portal.

Web portal integration

The new iOS and Android applications we built for FortisBC integrates with the existing architecture of its online web portal. It was also built to be able to expand with more and newer features, and be modified and updated.

We designed universal interfaces to easily extract the data that the mobile application would need from the web portal. We also increased system performance in the process by using modern server architecture techniques.

Emphasis on security

There were many steps taken to ensure that user information is protected. We used certificate pinning to eliminate the possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks. On both iOS and Android platforms, the FortisBC app will not run on devices that have been rooted (or jailbroken) to ensure that user information does not fall in the wrong hands. All third party libraries that were used in the app were thoroughly researched and evaluated against security requirements.

User testing

The FortisBC app is meant to be used by a very broad demographic range. Usability and ease of navigation were top priority as anyone (including individuals who are less tech-savvy or have disabilities) should have no difficulty using the app. We conducted user testing on the original design FortisBC provided us with, in order to validate and make informed improvements to the UX/UI of the app. From the 18 participants that took part in the testing process, we found that the login/registration process wasn’t intuitive enough, and certain elements on the app were difficult to read. We then mitigated these concerns with improved designs.

FortisBC mobile app account screens

Mobile app user testing

In short…

The iOS and Android app that TTT Studios built for FortisBC is secure and accessible by all British Columbians.

The new server that TTT Studios set up not only integrates the mobile app with FortisBC’s existing web portal, but also improves the system performance of the app.

After conducting extensive user testing, TTT Studios made informed improvements to the existing design of the app.

FortisBC