Solarity Community Solar
Solarity Platform for Business is a B2B service by Entergy to reach a corporate goal of reducing carbon emissions by 50% by 2030, including accessing various sources of energy beyond just gas turbine generation.
Project Profile
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Time 219-2020
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Role UX Designer
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Team 2 UX designer, 1 UX researcher, 1 developer, 1 product manager, 1 business Analyst
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My main contributions
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Research, journey map, ideation
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Low/hi-fi design
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Prototyping and user test
Project Overview
Solarity is a community solar product offered by Entergy & it is in the effort of Entergy to reach a corporate goal of reducing carbon emissions by 50% by 2030, including accessing various sources of energy beyond just gas turbine generation. Entergy is responsible for buying/owning/leasing land and building solar farms across the Entergy Operating Companies (OpCos), which adds a sustainable power source into those regional energy grids. Solarity's mission is to bring solar to all of Entergy's residential customers.
Discovery & Define
User Interview & Survey
We started our mission by understanding desirability for a community solar program. After completing both qualitative and quantitative research, it was determined that a subset of Entergy customers is interested in a community solar product. By joining a solar initiative, customers feel like they are part of a like-minded community of individuals with similar sustainability goals. Even further, customers induce little risk in this method, as other solar options (i.e., rooftop solar) are expensive to initiate and have lengthy payback periods.
Interviewed with 15 participants about community solar program, who were Entergy's customers.
We also uncovered what pain points make Entergy's customers lose interest to be a part o a community solar program. According to our research there were three key areas:
Awareness
• Customers are not aware of solar options outside of rooftop solar
Plan Options
• Customers want a program that fits their budget and energy usage
Impact
• Customers want to know the impact of their efforts on their local community
Personas
After doing interviews and also seeing the survey result, we had a good understanding of our target for Solarity projects and it was time to create personas.
Competitive Analysis
UX design team and Strategic designers worked on competitive analysis research together. We learned that community solar programs have unique challenges in their cost recovery in order to balance the overall solar asset and program costs while also offering a value proposition to participants while simultaneously not adversely impacting the utility’s shareholders and/or non-participating customers.
Community Solar – overview of regulatory constructs, policy & design issues
The challenge of maintaining this balancing act is captured with the following graphic:
Value to the partisipating customers
Cost of the community solar program
Cost of the underlying solar asset
Impact on other stakeholders
Designing a program that balances the underlying costs in order to provide value to participants, without adversely impacting stakeholders (non-participants and sponsoring utility)
The Challenge of Community Solar – overview of regulatory constructs, policy & design issues
Define Challenges
Design
From the competitive analysis of other solar and community solar companies, we also found opportunities to differentiate Solarity's experience for prospective customers:
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Create a seamless experience - several competitors had websites with overwhelming experiences.
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State the value props up front - competitors had complex messaging on how their programs worked.
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Focus transparency and being a part of a movement - competitors focused on savings when that wasn't entirely true.
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Give people plan options - many competitors did not provide multiple plans for different customers, and when they did, their UI did not focus on plan selection options.
Ideation Session
After gathering information from our research & discovery phase, I hosted an ideation session to create an opportunity for our team to walk through what we learned and define what is the best solution for customers & share our ideas on what are epics and features of the Solarity product.
Solution & Product features
According to our discussion, we decided that Solar Community customers need a responsive digital platform. For purpose of the Alpha version, Epics and Features were used interchangeably. The following were the leading Epics that created the foundation of the Solarity product:
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Home Page with Educational Content
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Select Location (OpCo Location)
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Compare Plans/Impact
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OpCo-specific Home Page
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Easy Sign Up
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Join Waitlist
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Sign-Up confirmation & social share
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Help Page (Contact Us & FAQ)
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Calculate the Number of Spots Remaining
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Low-Income Feature
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Email Communications (Welcome, Waitlist, Account Modification)
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Ideation Session – Brainstorming on the Solarity product features
Information Architucture
These insights and proposals led us to building the information architecture. We assumed most visitors would have a lack of understanding about the product, so it was critical to address their questions of why, what, and how while motivating them to sign up. we organized the site into four areas: awareness > consideration > buy-in > engagement.
Information Architecture – Creating IA after defining what are features for the Solarity platform in the ideation session
Lo-Fi Wireframes
To have a better understanding of the idea and involve the engineering and product manager, before starting high fidelity design, we designed some lo-fi wireframes and discussed design team ideas on each step of the platform with engineering. These wireframes helped design team to better collaborate with the rest of the team.
Low Fidelity Wireframes in Sketch – Collaborated with engineering & product manager on design team ideas for the Solarity platform flow and steps.
Develop
Style Guide
After collaborating with the engineering and product manager, I worked on revising some screens and creating lo-fi wireframes that we are able to prepare for user testing with participants. Branding team at the same time shared with us the final logo and color pallet. Another designer and I started to work on Style Guide for the application and I was able to bring color and charecter to our wireframes at the early stage.
Style Guide Design - Solarity platform
Hi-Fi Wireframes
As I mentioned in the Discovery & Research phase, we found out the Solarity platform needs to focus on 3 key areas:
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Awareness - Customers are not aware of solar options outside of rooftop solar.
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Impact - Customers want to know the impact of their efforts on their local community.
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Plan options - Customers want a program that fits their budget and energy usage. Many competitors did not provide multiple plans for different customers, and when they did, their UI did not focus on plan selection options.
Together with a UX design teammate we designed hi-fi wireframes in Sketch, and by collaborating with a strategic designer, we polished our messaging. We created a clickable prototype with inVision to test our design with 10 participants, virtually.
Clickable Prototype in inVision- Solarity platform
User Testing
Together with a UX design teammate and strategic designer, we refined our messaging through A/B testing and user testing sessions. Results from testing sessions led us to make the following changes:
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Separate cost from impact - when the price was primary, users were no longer focused on impact. When the impact was displayed first, users more responsive to plan costs:
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Prioritizing essential information for each plan overview:
Develop
Conclusion
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300 - initial signs ups from our pilot launch
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5 - Branded sites meeting the needs of each of our operating companies.
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Scaling up - Solarity is currently in the process of being added to Entergy's other operating regions.
Polish Wireframes
After getting feedback from 20 user testing sessions with our customers, together with a design teammate, we polished wireframes and reviewed them with our team. At this point, we were ready to develop & launch Solarity platform and get ready for the pilot. I have the main polished screens for Awareness, Impact & Plan options in the following but also you can walk through the Solarity platform HERE.
Awareness:
Impact:
Plan Options:
Check Out & Confirmation:
After Launch results
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300 - initial signs ups from our pilot launch
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5 - Branded sites meet the needs of each of our operating companies.
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Scaling up - Solarity is currently in the process of being added to Entergy's other operating regions.
If you are interested to visit the Solarity website, please click HERE.