SUNGEVITY SOLAR
MOBILE APP DESIGN
THE PROJECT
We observed that homeowners who installed Sungevity solar systems on their roofs had a lot of pride in their "new solar home". They were checking their solar production and sharing their “solar experience” and electric bill savings with family and friends via text, email and word of mouth.
We already had an online web app where customers could view their solar energy production (and earlier in the year had designed our first referral center) but this online portal was not responsive and did not provide the best-in-class solar experience that was core to our company's mission.
We saw the perfect opportunity to give customers an easy way to share the pride of being a solar homeowner and pass on solar savings from the palm of their hand, by designing and delivering Sungevity's first mobile app.
STEP 1 / EMPATHIZE & DEFINE
Make sure we know who were designing for. Develop a clear understanding of the problem we're going to solve.
Our mobile app team met with the Customer Insights Manager and reviewed the latest and greatest demographic and psychographic information about our customers, what they're looking for in a mobile app experience, and what opportunities we had to deliver moments of joy and delight.
Our takeaways:
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Empathy for our Primary and Secondary personas, Claire and Tim, who represented our target users.
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Defined customer needs and wants and business needs and wants and developed clear project success criteria & goals
CUSTOMER GOALS
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Show off my Sungevity solar home to family and friends
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See how much clean solar energy my home is producing
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Share solar savings with my referral code, earn referral cash and give friends discounts if they go solar with Sungevity.
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Design and deliver an industry-leading mobile solar monitoring and referral experience
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Keep customers engaged and connected to us
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Mobile app should generate referrals and drive more business
BUSINESS GOALS
STEP 2 / IDEATE
Explore design possibilities and refine direction
We had a version 1.0 specification document that was written up by the head of Marketing which defined the core functionality that the app MUST have: Solar production monitoring viewable by day, week, month, year and lifetime, the ability to understand kilowatts of solar power generated in a more “humanized” way, and the ability to share the solar monitoring data to Facebook, Twitter and via text and email and an ability to refer friends via a reimagined for mobile referral center.
The project manager and I held an initial brainstorming session to come up with as many wild and diverse ideas as possible for our v1.0 mobile app spec. We quickly began to identify viable design directions to explore further and presented low fidelity concept designs to our business stakeholders in Marketing and ran the design concepts by our Development Team for a preliminary feasibility check to make sure our ideas were feasible.
Post-it note free writing session generated diverse design ideas and we discover themes, categories, and potential features, etc.
Whiteboarded different design concepts to quickly explore a range of design compositions.
Called in many different people to run ideas by them. We began to discover what made sense, what didn't and what we were missing.
Recorded our explorations and distilled our ideas down to 3 directions that we wanted to explore with low fidelity prototyping
STEP 3 / PROTOTYPE & TEST
Design Low-fi & High-fi prototypes and test with users
For the initial prototypes I produced paper sketches and presented them to easily accessible coworkers, who were also solar homeowners, to see if the designs clearly conveyed information about solar power production, and provided a clear and easy to use navigation and sharing and referral discoverability.
After gathering a satisfactory amount of testing feedback, I had enough data to produce high fidelity designs in Sketch and build clickable mobile prototypes in InVision. I did a lot of pixel pushing and many many many rounds of design iteration and additional user testing to discover what made sense to customers and what was technically feasible for our development group, and what would meet out v1.0 mobile app business specifications.
After many rounds of user testing, stakeholder reviews and development consultation, we came to a viable final design for development.
STEP 4 / LAUNCH, ANALYZE PERFORMANCE TEST, LEARN & IMPROVE
Launch Sungevity Mobile App v1.0 and measure performance
After many months of design refinements, customer, stakeholder and development team meetings, we successfully launched Sungevity's first mobile app on iOS and Android. The project manager and I coordinated our mobile app release with a marketing outreach campaign targeting customers and the app enjoyed strong early adoption numbers.
Customers were happy to finally have an easy way to show and share their solar production insights to friends and to spread the sunshine through a simple and easy referral email or text message via the app and the Marketing Team had a new mobile app referral channel to drive business. Mission accomplished!
SUMMARY
Sunshine delivered in the palm of your hand
The mobile app team comprised of the Project Manager, myself as UX/UI Designer and our Development team delivered a v1.0 mobile app that empowered customers to not only view their solar production and understand the positive household impact in more "humanized" terms miles of carbon emissions offset, and what % of their home was powered by sunshine from their iOS or Android smartphone, but to also share this information to Facebook, Twitter, and refer friends to also go solar via Text and Email.
We achieved the customer and business goals that we set out to accomplish with our v1.0 mobile app, we learned a lot and developed new standard working procedures to streamline communication and project coordination between product, development and design, and we added a new proficiency to our development team.
CUSTOMER GOALS
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Show off my Sungevity solar home to family and friends
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See how much clean solar energy my home is producing
-
Share solar savings with my referral code, earn referral cash and give friends discounts if they go solar with Sungevity.
-
Design and deliver an industry-leading mobile solar monitoring and referral experience
-
Keep customers engaged and connected to us
-
Mobile app should generate referrals and drive more business
BUSINESS GOALS