- Interaction
- UI
- Mobile
- Process
After installing their solar panels, Palmetto customers were invited to use a power monitoring app. However, the app was unnamed and often confusing. This was my first project at Palmetto, and it was crucial in setting the tone for how I envisioned our team working together.
The first step of this work was to align our Business Goals with our Customer Goals – which turned out to be straightforward. The Business aimed to showcase ROI to customers and encourage repeat app usage. Meanwhile, our Customers wanted to track their solar production and easily access customer support.
Bingo – these goals are perfectly aligned.
The work began with a competitive analysis to understand how similar dashboard-based products functioned and what our competitors offered. This would give us a basic understanding of why our customers struggled to understand their energy production and ideas for how we could better present this information.
This part of the process would become the foundation of our design work.
We would also show several options and pair those options with our design rationale. This was done to help facilitate discussions and to provide context for all stakeholders.
Once a design was agreed upon, we would work on the “Dev Handoff” where we would show each different state and provide every option of text for every possible condition.
During the iteration process, I tested the design against our stated Business and User Goals using usertesting.com. Through this work, we discovered how simple UX improvements could significantly enhance our customers' outcomes.
The dashboard you see here was the existing design. You can see why it’s confusing - how can the production number be larger than the consumption data, but the graphs show the opposite?
Another problem exists here too. What happens when we don’t have consumption data?
For our standard users with the necessary hardware to provide consumption data, we focused on displaying consumption versus production. I also adjusted the data visualization to be relative, where the greater value always fills the available width, and the smaller value is shown as a percentage of the larger one.
The next step would be understanding why our customers were having trouble finding support when they needed it. For this work, all we needed was a simple heuristic evaluation. In a nutshell, the users could not contact support because the UI did not reflect the system status which changed depending on support hours.
The final step was to address a business challenge and encourage repeat visits. The issue stemmed from a technical hurdle: not all of Palmetto’s hardware reported grid energy usage.
The best-case scenario for many Palmetto users was viewing daily production data, but missing offset data due to the type of hardware installed at their residence. This was hiding the ROI for our customers. The solution was to connect to the customer’s electricity provider.
To encourage customers to connect to their electricity provider, Palmetto sent out emails explaining the benefits. While over 75% of recipients attempted to connect, only 20% succeeded.
Why? What we learned was most customers lived in areas where electricity providers did not permit external access to their billing history.
Pre-populate the user's electricity provider if it's in a supported zip code.
If it's not supported, inform the user that it will be soon but do not give a firm timeline.
Ask the user to provide their utility provider so that we can update them when it becomes supported and so that we can build a database of providers that are missing.
The results of this work led to a ~150% increase in repeat visits, a ~57% rise in self-reported customer satisfaction, and a ~60% increase in electricity provider connections. Additionally, it opened up new opportunities for Palmetto to collaborate with utility providers nationwide, advancing our mission of widespread solar adoption at the consumer level.