Making energy management feel effortless

Wallbox made some of the most awarded electric vehicle chargers in the world. Their hardware sat in homes and offices across five continents. But the app that controlled it all — MyWallbox — had a 2.6-star rating and was full of complaints.

Users loved their chargers. They dreaded opening the app. For a company whose entire value proposition was a connected, smart charging experience, this was a serious problem.

But a bad interface was only the symptom. The real issue was how the product was being made: three teams working in isolation, no shared design language, and features being shipped without anyone asking what the user actually needed.

The instinct in these situations is to jump straight to redesigning screens. Instead, I proposed something different: build a Design Hub — a shared structure that would connect three separate squads and give them a common way of working.

One designer embedded in each squad. A shared design system they all contributed to and drew from. And a set of regular ceremonies that would replace ad-hoc decisions with something more deliberate.

The idea was simple: when teams share a system and shared rituals, good design stops depending on the right person being in the right meeting. It becomes structural.

Before the design system, each squad was building components from scratch. The same button existed in six slightly different versions. Designers spent time recreating things that already existed. Engineers questioned which version was correct.

We built the system in parallel with the redesign — not before it and not after it, but alongside it. Every screen we designed either used an existing component or became the source of a new one. Three months in, new features took hours instead of days.

The system was documented in ZeroHeight so engineers could use it directly. It wasn't just a Figma file — it was a shared contract between design and engineering.

84% of all app sessions went through the Charger Control screen. That became our proving ground — the place to show that a completely different approach was possible.

The app had been built from the inside out: it exposed what the hardware was doing, using technical language that made sense to engineers. Users didn't care about amps — they cared about whether their car would be charged in time for their morning commute. We flipped the model.

The redesign replaced jargon with plain language, collapsed twelve status colors into four clear states, and surfaced the information users actually needed — charge time remaining, energy cost, green energy percentage — without requiring any technical knowledge.

The rating went from 2.6 to 4 stars. Connection success jumped from 83% to 96%. But the most significant change wasn't a metric — it was organizational.

When I left, Wallbox had a functioning Design Hub with six designers across three squads, a documented design system that engineering used daily, and a culture where design was part of every sprint — not a hand-off at the end of one.

The infrastructure would keep working long after any individual project was done.