Project Sol Overview

• Project Goal - To monitor, track, and inspect solar panel installations with local municipalities and help standardize best practices across the country.

• Stakeholders -

  • US Department of Energy (Grant providers)

  • The company contracted by US D.O.E. (Company A)

  • Company sub-contracted by Company A (Company B, the company that hired Neon Owl)

• Team Members -

  • UX Lead

  • UX Research (Myself)

  • Company B CEO

  • Company B CTO

  • Project Manager

• Timeline - Sporadically over ~2 years

• Constraints - Since the project was being funded by a federal grant we had a hard limit on our budget, as well as being locked into the scope defined in the grant. This was also a benefit as it helped curb scope creep. The project had already been through one round of design with a previous designer who was no longer with the project.

Project Notes

• Steps -

  • Review federal SOW

  • Perform a Holistic review of the previous version of the site on mobile and desktop

  • User Interviews (Digital and in-person)

  • Identify and build user types/personas

  • Redesign site and app

  • Build new sections of the site

• Results - The result was a system that was much easier to use and navigate. Thankfully the IA of the system was solid so most of our work was spent making the design consistent throughout and making the app useable. There were several "low hanging fruit” improvements that really helped like making buttons work like buttons and changing the positive confirmation pop-ups from orange to blue.

• Challenges - The largest challenge was the person in charge of the project from Company A. They had no experience in tech, only in solar panel installation and roofing, so they had a tendency to over-promise on what the system would be able to do, and then underestimate how long or complicated the adjustment would actually be. This one stakeholder made the project much more difficult than it needed to be.

• Impact - My two biggest impacts on the project were:

  • The project was entirely virtual except for one in-person industry conference where I had 3 days to interview as many users as possible. My UX Lead had a prior commitment and wasn’t able to travel, so I volunteered. I was flown down to perform the research on my own. I was told that Company A had their own research team and practices, and would be performing research alongside me while I performed in-person interviews in a private room. When I arrived I learned that almost none of this was true. Instead, I performed interviews on the fly on the conference floor. Then over the next two days I helped Company A’s team perform their research as well. They had a 0% success rate with their method of “hand random people walking by their booth an iPad and ask them to complete a survey”. During my research, I identified an entire User Type that had been missed while leading Company A’s team. Meanwhile, the challenging stakeholder from Company A over-promised the site capabilities to industry peers in attendance, effectively abandoning their researchers.

  • After the UX Lead retired, I took over the design decisions during the second phase of development. I had almost finished the design, but after a meeting where I kept pushing to figure out what function a section was supposed to be performing, I realized I could cut the entire section out with two checkboxes and a search bar in a different part of the site. I wasn’t sure how it would be received or if Company A would go for the change. But after submitting the original to-spec final design, and also my “this would cut out the entire section” suggestion, I was told that both companies liked my recommendation better, and accepted it without me even being there to present and defend it. This entire section was one that I had previously identified months earlier as being particularly troublesome and warned Company B that when they reached this section they were going to encounter problems. I’m quite pleased that I was able to design a solution to their problem.

Project Takeaways

• Challenges - The single largest challenge to this project was the Project Lead from Company A. The system was complex and challenging in its own right and needed careful attention to make sure that it wasn’t needlessly complicated. This was constantly made difficult as the Project Lead wanted to adjust the software features on a near-weekly basis with little understanding of what the requests would mean for both coding and design. Had the federal SOW not already been in place, I imagine the software would have scope crept until it was supposed to make the user breakfast and tuck them into bed at night.

• What worked well - When not having to field requests from the Project Lead, the rest of the team worked quite well together. My part of this great team was doing a large share of the designing and analyzing of our research. I brought many questions and concerns to the team and identified problem areas early on.

• What would I do differently -There’s not much that was in my control that I would have done differently. I believed in what was being built and wanted to see it succeed so I was motivated to make sure that the design was the best it could be. Other than removing the Project Lead the only other thing I would change is speaking up sooner when I identified potential problem areas in the software.