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Community Solar - Market Enablement

Making the process of engaging with green energy easier & more connected than ever before.

Community Solar — Marketplace Enablement


TLDR
I led design for a team that in ~ 6 months defined, designed, and launched a 0-1 digital experience focused on engaging customer around the benefits of community solar energy & making the process of engaging with green energy easier & more connected than ever before.

What Is Community Solar?

Community solar provides homeowners, renters, and businesses equal access to the economic and environmental benefits of solar energy generation. It expands access to solar for all, including in particular low-to-moderate income customers most impacted by a lack of access, all while building a stronger, distributed, and more resilient electric grid.

This experience was centered around building (from the ground up) an informative experience that allowed a customer to explore what community solar is, understand the cost & feasibility for their lifestyle, and connect with existing community solar facilities. Community solar was a new initiative that had the potential to offer a lot of customer benefit.

Goals:
We needed to create a 0 - 1 experience that would allows a customer to explore what community solar is, understand the cost & feasibility for their lifestyle, & connect them with existing community solar facilities that could act as their third party supplier.

Responsibilities:

I worked within a cross functional group (with one other designer, 3 to 5 developers, several functional partners and a product owner) — leading the design of this experience. We used design thinking within an agile process to ensure we were driving results and creating an impactful experience for our customers.

Responsible for:

  • Driving the direction of and designing a 0 - 1 experience

  • Helping to lead workshops and other alignment activities

  • Helped conduct the research & usability testing

  • Created & iterated on design solutions through rapid prototyping

  • Designed the end to end experience

Community Solar Calculator site — https://secure.comed.com/solar/MarketEnablement

 

What is Community Solar Market Enablement?

Two sided marketplace — connecting customers with community solar facilities.

 

Building a new 0-1 solution

We worked to build a new solution (0-1) connecting our utility customers to vetted community solar facilities and contractors.

Foundational discovery research

My early research focused on digital experiences, with focuses on informative calculators, marketplaces, & information rich experiences. 
I analyzed how other best-in-class companies were solving similar challenges & identified key pieces/ themes across them all.

 

This research allowed me to identify the critical features of our MVP:


  • Enable customers calculate current (utility) costs

  • Define a Value Proposition focused results page (highlighting cost comparisons & information around benefits solar energy)

  • Creating a solar facilities cost comparison tool

  • Building connection points with our vetted solar facilities

Overall we needed to:

  • Create an informative, self-service driven experience (mobile responsive web experience)

  • Increase knowledge around the availability & benefits of community solar

  • Build a tool to connects customers to community solar facilities.

 

Rapid prototyping & testing

I accelerated innovation & speed to market with rapid prototyping & testing.

Post discovery, I quickly moved to create our first prototype. After building a prototype that included our foundational pieces we wanted to quickly test with users to learn. We ended up testing 2 iterations of the same flow across two rounds of testing.

 

First iteration explored if we had the right experience pieces:

Testing of our first prototype flopped, but it revealed plenty of learnings:

  • We were not clearly communicating the value of this tool to the customer.

  • We had too much “Utility speak” in our content which caused confusion

  • During testing, 4 out of 4 of our initial testers shared they would have dropped out prior to completion.

With our first prototype, customers didn’t understand the value of this tool, and found the experience to be too cumbersome.

With this feedback we paused testing and I brought that feedback back to our product team to show how we need to reshape this experience.

 

Take 2

Our second iteration focused on improving the identified friction points and decreasing the time it took for our user to arrive at the “Aha” moment.

  • We moved our value proposition to the second step in the calculator flow (prev. step 8). Showing value early on increased customer retention and engagement.

  • In addition we strategically used tool tips to create more clarity around certain pieces of information, and help customers more easily locate said information, reducing churn.

Version 2 had much better success rates. We saw increased conversion rates and improved customer satisfaction. We went from 0/4 users being successful to 4/4 users!

 

MVP experience

Once we successfully validated our core features, we had an MVP that we were ready to launch with.

Savings Calculator

This was the first step in the experience which focused on allowing a customer to enter their current costs to get a baseline understanding if solar would be a beneficial option for them.

Design for one of the steps in the calculator flow.

Composite view of the calculator experience flow.

The calculator was the most challenging part of the experience due to the technical nature of the information needed.

Calculating a customers current cost enabled us to show them a cost comparison estimate (in the next step). By showing customers the intended value of this experience early on in the flow we found that we increased CSAT & engagement.


Calculator Results

Our results page was key, as this was where the customer could quickly and easily determine the impact & savings that community solar could bring about. Our goal was to show potential savings to the customer to help them determine if community solar was a good option for their lifestyle.

 

On top of a dollar savings preview we also initially explored the idea of adding a carbon offset display. Unfortunately, this was later removed due to concerns around the level of accuracy of the information.

Marketplace - Facilities & Rates Comparison Tool

After customers understood the value of community solar, we created a tool that allowed customers to do a quick comparison to determine which facility would be the best fit based on their unique needs.

The marketplace facilities page enabled customers to directly compare various solar facilities based on a variety of identifiers

Marketplace - Facilities Connection

Lastly we wanted to ensure our customers could easily engage with the facilities they were interested in.

Customers could click on a facility to learn more about it, view project details, and connect with that facility to start the conversation around engaging with and benefiting from community solar.

 

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Learnings

Rapid prototyping and usability testing allowed us to quickly gather key insights to create a better MVP experience. The ability to gather those insights and quickly shift directions helped keep the project on track and ultimately create an improved and more engaging customer experience.

We also learned that our customers didn’t understand “Utility speak”. We had to be intentional around drafting content that was easy to understand

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Impact

In the end this tool was found to be a big success with feedback from users saying things like:

  • “I found it gives me more information than any other solar estimate sites that i’ve been on . . . So highly recommend it”

  • “Its pretty quick, pretty helpful and it can give you a good overview of alot of the stuff you need to know.”

  • “(It’s) Useful because it includes everything i need to know to make a decision . . . I think it provides enough info that i could take it to discuss with my wife and be able to make a decision.”