EV charging, designed from the ground up for Circle K's global app

Circle K's global app already carried most of a forecourt: Fuel, Car Wash, loyalty, payment, offers — used by more than five million Circle K customers around the world. EV was the part that did not exist yet, and it could not be a link out to somewhere else. Charging had to become a first-class service inside the app people already had on their phone — designed from zero, but at home next to services built years earlier.

Charging is also not refuelling. A tank takes four minutes and asks nothing of the driver; a session takes half an hour, depends on hardware standing in a car park, and can fail in a dozen ways the driver cannot see. Years of designing for EV charging had taught us that error handling has to be bulletproof: the driver needs complete certainty that the session is running as it should — through push notifications and a Live Activity on the lock screen — so they can walk away, rest on a long journey and enjoy a coffee and something to eat in the station, instead of standing guard over the charger.

The complete EV experience, end to end: finding a site, starting the session with a single tap, watching it run, paying for it, and finding it again in history. Every one of those screens was drawn from scratch for this app, on its existing design system, so EV reads as Circle K rather than as a charging product that happened to be embedded.

One-tap start charging was not invented here. We designed it, and then spent a long time getting it right, in Charge — Circle K's dedicated charging app.

We also designed Autocharge, which starts charging fully automatically: the driver plugs in the cable and the session begins on its own, with no tap at all. Like one-tap start, Autocharge was first designed, iterated and thoroughly tested in Charge before it came into the global app.

This was a big project. We worked with many teams: product, engineering, charging operations, loyalty, payments, brand, and the local market teams. The app was already live and served several businesses at once, and the back ends were owned by different teams.

It was also some of the most enjoyable work we have done, and a huge experience for us. The brief was clear, many people cared about the details, and the result is something you can go to a charger and use.