Product Design
Product Design
An Evolving Methodology
In my experience, once trust between my team and our business partners have been established, the thrilling work begins.
Building Trust provides
Business Partners: strategic blueprint to discover the sweet spot between generating ROI and improving User Satisfaction
Product Partners: program overview, how initiatives weave together
Engineering Partners: the ability to safely adopt newer technologies to increase production
Sunnova Energy - Sales - Quoting Services
The Business’s Goals
At Sunnova, my users are dealers helping residential/commercial owners scale their energy system to their needs.
Dealers require the ability to
Manually change the system to their user’s needs (Manual Design)
Provide a customized design service (DaaS)
Quickly add accessories (ALS)
My Role
Product Designer
completed features
Design as a Service (DaaS)
Accessory Loan Simplification (ALS)
Manual Design
Design System Tilt & Shift
MVP Notification System
MVP Research Repo
Tools
Figma, Maze, Confluence
Duration
September 2023 - October 2024
My Goals
To create a product our users want to adopt, as opposed to a product they’re required to use. Once reasons for user dissatisfaction are collected, analyzed and prioritized, incremental improvements are added into the roadmap.
The Requirements
Heuristic Evaluation
Holistic product overview
Stakeholder insights/engagement
1:1 shared deliverables for design and engineering
Build up the MVP Design System to incorporate all the required assets
Localization for European expansion
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Outdated legacy code in addition to a lack of user insights.
Change management for in-flight projects
No dedicated FE support
Minimal ENG engagement on Figma and poor fidelity to finalized designs
Start with Clarity
Having worked on the Information Architecture project, I knew the importance of knowing every crook and cranny of the overall experience. Both as a product designer, and as a teammate. Information is key, so pulling in subject matter experts to validate the site map was the first step in gathering a full understanding of the experience.
Understand who our users are
What workarounds were the users taking? How often did they experience delight versus frustration? What are their expectations? I set to work building a case to utilize user analytics to better understand the needs of our users.
Filling in the gaps
The Quoting experience provides the user with data to showcase how their property could benefit from solar panels, batteries and storage. As a bespoke experience to Sunnova, it fulfills the needs of the user, however it left many gaps in industry standards. So I began filling these gaps while taking on the ‘tilt and shift’ imitative.
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For any of these improvements to provide meaningful improvements to the user, we need to understand what is not working today. Due to a lack of user insights, we had to start with small, measurable steps, such as establishing user analytics.
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The OG designs only supplied views for a full screen desktop experience, something analytics proved to be insufficient. I used Figma Variables to allow for a smooth, responsive experience.
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The OG Figma document walked the team through the user flow, however it did not capture all interactive states. Progress indicators, loading states, and error states were missed. The value of ensuring these interactions were captured is a smooth user experience.
Workshops Facilitated
UXR Foundations
Workshop focused on brainstorming how we use the data we’re collecting on users, and what we want to do with it.
How we work Workshop
Workshop focused on enabling fellow designers to pop into files as/if needed.
Leave it better than you found it
Inheriting another designer’s files can be a tricky affair, but a good system can salvage almost any cumbersome file. My own system ensures my file structure and data are clearly labeled and updated. I believe in an open door policy that if designers are working in the same environment, we should be sharing artifacts when the use case is warranted.
Growth
One of the largest learning lessons I took from my experience at Sunnova was how to ensure the heuristic evaluation’s top criteria were prioritized in each release. Pushing the business’s directive, while simultaneously pushing Product Design’s initiative.