question: As the number of mobile devices has increased, software development teams have focused on releasing mobile applications, allowing users to carry out transactions, access information and improve their lifestyle more efficiently. Nevertheless, even when providing useful means for carrying out daily tasks, users report dissatisfaction or frustration when using these applications. For energy companies, mobile applications that fail to provide both usefulness and ease of use may reduce their adoption and an increase in the company’s workload, as users will require company workers to solve problems they could solve on their own. In this paper, we report how we applied exploratory testing and ad-hoc usability inspection to identify improvement opportunities during the development of a mobile application that would allow users to measure their power consumption, supporting social distancing in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. After identified a set of functional and usability problems, the development team redesigned the application, which was perceived as both useful and easy to use from the point of view of the managers that requested it. Also, we report lessons learned that are useful for practitioners willing to replicate this experience. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.