Product Design
Who this is serving
Sunnova Energy International Inc.
Sunnova Energy International Inc. is an American energy company that provides residential solar and energy storage services. The company was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in Houston, Texas.
What the goal is
At Sunnova, my users are dealers helping residential/commercial owners scale their energy system to their specific 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 Objectives
Collect user feedback
Tilt and Shift migration from legacy
Apply Heuristic Evaluation findings
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
My Role
Product Designer for Sales Quoting services
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
How I got there
Having worked on Information Architecture previously, 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.
Fill 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.
Partner with product leadership on storytelling
Limited experience with Figma often resulted in rapid clicks that skipped past key interactions in prototypes, amongst other missed opportunities that interrupted the storytelling of how we as a team were addressing the problem statement.
My remedy was to revert back to lofi interactions until the PM and I were in aggreement before migrating to high fidelity prototypes. By exporting a video that could be played and paused to provide time to address questions or further hone in a critical action, our ability to smoothly walk the proposed solution to multiple groups of leadership.
Before & After
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.