SUNGEVITY SOLAR
SOLAR POWER
PRODUCTION MONITORING
The Challenge
Update the UX/UI and add new features to our existing solar monitoring web app
I was the Lead UX/UI Designer for the Solar Power Production Monitoring web app component of a seamless online solar experience. I worked with the Product Manager, CMO, Marketing stakeholders, and the development team to deliver an improved 2.0 version to our customers.
The problem we were solving: The existing v1.0 Production Monitoring web app was visually out of date (using older off-brand colors, and a claustrophobic and overly complex layout) and was built on outdated technology (a restrictive, brittle backend, that prevented us from being able to support data visualizations from newer solar monitoring hardware that would soon be installed for new customers.). We also had an opportunity to add feature requests from customers and explore visionary ideas from our CMO and Product Manager.
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The project was kicked off with a review of an existing v2.0 specification document and a design working session to generate ideas with the Project Manager and lead developer.
We talked through "must-have" v2.0 features:
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Integrate a 5-day weather forecast widget to help customers understand how weather impacts their solar production
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Come up with "Humanizing statistics" - ways to help customers understand the value and impact of their solar production in more relevant terms than "Kilowatt-hours" of solar power generated.
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Enable customers to easily switch between viewing their personal solar production, viewing the cumulative production of their system AND the systems of friends and family they had referred (to see their group solar production/environmental impact), and view the entire Sungevity fleet solar production/positive environmental impact.
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Enable customers to download an excel file of their performance data for detailed personal analysis.
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Carve out real estate in the page for Marketing to inform customers of deals, discounts for smart home hardware and services, and encourage customers to refer friends and earn discounts.
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At this early stage, the good ol' whiteboard was the fastest way to quickly work through data visualization ideas and page compositions for all the new required features, and get feedback from a series of stakeholders and coworker-customers.
Once I narrowed down a design direction with the Product Manager and CMO, I used Sketch and InVision to create high fidelity clickable prototypes to test with customers to make sure we were coming to design solutions and drill down interactions that would add value for our customers and meet our business needs.
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After 3 rounds of user testing and customer feedback and development feasibility checks, I came to a final design solution for our v2.0 Production Monitoring project.
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I worked with our development team throughout the build sprints and gave the design quality assurance check approval before the final shippable candidate was released.
Solar Power Production Monitoring
Final Designs
Daily view
Weekly view
Monthly view
Year view
Lifetime view
Detailed reports
Success!
I worked with our exceptional team to successfully deliver our v2.0 Solar Power Production Monitoring design. We were able to add features that customers had long requested, that our Marketing team required, and to develop a solution built with a rock-solid backend, that future-proofed our solar monitoring web app to support all forthcoming solar monitoring data formats from new monitoring hardware being installed on our customer's solar systems.