Designing a two sided marketplace — connecting customers with community solar facilities.

Creating the foundation for a two sided marketplace to increase interest and engagement between customers & sponsored community solar facilities

Check out the project
https://secure.comed.com/solar/MarketEnablement

Overview

Community solar provides homeowners, renters, and businesses equal access to the economic and environmental benefits of solar energy generation. Community solar 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.

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Project goals:

Create a 0–1 digital experience that informs customer around the benefits of community solar energy & makes the process of engaging with green energy easier & more connected than ever before.

• Increase knowledge around the availability & benefits of community solar (Landing page & informative resources).
• Help customers understand the cost & feasibility for their lifestyle (Calculator experience).
• Build a tool to connects customers to community solar facilities (two-sided marketplace).

This project allowed us as a business to expand our customer base to third party solar suppliers and allowed our customers to potentially save with lower energy rates/ costs.

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Responsibilities:

Over the course of 5–6 months I co-led the design for this MVP.

Key responsibilities:

Product design, visual design, prototyping, product strategy, user research, workshops

• Drive the direction of and designing a 0–1 experience
• lead workshops and other alignment activities
• Conduct the research & usability testing
• Create & iterate on design solutions through rapid prototyping
• Designing the end 2 end experience

I worked within a cross functional team:
- 1 designer (they covered research & flows I was more design, wireframes & prototyping )
- 4 developers
- a PM
- a product owner

Research and Exploration

We started off with a kick off looking to understand how we could drive value for the business, but also focusing on how we could create an experience that would be impactful for our customers. I helped lead the kickoff and conducted a number of initial workshops to make sure we had alignment across our team & other stakeholders.

We worked to build a new solution from the ground up starting with research and ideation. We conducted some lightweight initial research and used those learnings to jump into rapidly ideating & prototype a solution. Our goal was to get that prototype in front of customers as early as possible with the intentions to learn quickly and iterate on the experience.

With a condensed timeline I helped to make sure we had a game plan that would make sure we were setting our team up for success.

1. Initial research & competitor analysis (Think big)
2. Sketches/ Wireframes (Start small)
3. More research & usability testing (Learn fast)
4. Final designs (Build on learnings)

Customers
From existing research we were able to gather that this project would primarily impact two of our core customer groups.

1. 💵 Our savings conscious customers
2. 🌎 Our environmentally focused customers

Initial Research
Leveraging industry research and competitor analysis we learned:

• We needed to create clarity around value adds of engaging with our alternative energy providers.
• Environmental impact was a key focus for many of our customers
• Perceived effort & confusion was high, so we needed to make it a simple and easy to understand experience.

Once our product team was aligned on a vision we used competitor analysis to explore how a number of best in class companies were exploring similar problems — both inside and out of the energy industry.

Ideation & Prototyping

Once we understood the problem we quickly jumped into sketching and creating wireframes. Starting low fidelity allowed us to quickly explore a few different concept directions without slowing down the teams momentum. While ideating we were closely collaborating with our product & dev partners on the viability & feasibility of our solutions.

We landed on a solution with 4 core parts.

• First we would gather baseline data on customers current utility costs
• Then we were able to share how based on our customer usage trends solar could be a more cost efficient option for them.
• Next we allowed our customers to compare different facilities they could use as an alternate power supplier
• Lastly created an experience where they could learn more about & engage with sponsored community solar energy provides.

Freehand wireframes

Once we arrived at a solution we were comfortable with we created a prototype we could test with.

User Testing

After building out the prototype we had something we could use as a starting point. We conducted moderated interviews to collect feedback from our customers.

From the usability sessions with customers, we extracted some constructive insights.

Overall, customers didn’t understand the value this tool could provide and found the experience to be too cumbersome; thus they wouldn’t use it.

For our first iteration, in order to calculate the potential cost savings we needed to ask the users for certain pieces of data that were not typically readily available for customers (ex What is your estimated avg energy usage). Because that info didn’t tend to be easily accessible found it difficult and found it to be more of an annoyance than a value-add

With the initial concept we created we realized were not clearly communicating to the customer he value proposition early enough in the process to keep the user engaged. During user testing, 4 out of 4 of our users said at some point before completion that they would have just dropped out. While that was a tough blow, we were able to take those insights & make some informed decisions.

How we evolved (take 2 🎬)

Using those research insight we were able to bring that voice of the customer back to our product team to show how we need to reshape this experience to make it better.

• Moved value proposition to the second step in the calculator flow (prev step 8). This allowed customers to see if this tool will provide the value they were looking for. We realized If we could show value to the customers in one of the first few steps, than they were much more willing to stay engaged.
• In addition we created a clearer understanding around certain technical pieces of information were, and leveraged tool tips to help customers locate said information.

After pivoting we retested some of our improvements with additional users, with much better success and feedback. We saw increased conversion rates and improved customer satisfaction.

Results

Calculator Experience:

Savings calculator

The calculator was the most challenging part of the experience due to the technicality of the information needed. By showing customers the intended value of this experience early on in the flow we found that we increased CSAT & engagement.

Results Page:

Report estimate

The 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 Rates Comparison Tool:

Project comparison

After customers knew the value of community solar we wanted to connect them with various facilities that they could engage with if they were interested. We created a comparison tool that allowed customers to easily find the right facility for their needs with quick comparison on certain factors.

Marketplace Facilities Connection page:

Lastly as mentioned above we wanted to connect our customers with various facilities that they could engage with if they were interested. Customers could click on a facility to learn more about it, view project detail, and even connect with that facility to start engaging with and saving with community solar.

More details:

Details for the end to end calculator experience

Informative tool tip

Contact us page

Marketplace facility overview page

Facility overview UI (facility status, pagination& comparison selections)

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

• “I found it to give 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.”

My Takeaways

Our keys to success

• Think big
• Start small
• and Learn fast

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