Paper

Solar goes Social

Our 8-month sprint to a radiant community portal

Reading time: approx. 5′ 45″

Adaptive Design System

Business Impact & ROI

Corporate Usability

Customer Insights

Digital Ecosystems

Experience Design

Planning and realisation

Planning, implementing and successfully launching an international portal project within eight months requires an agile and disciplined approach. Many development steps must be carried out in the same time, concepts must be created quickly, solutions must be broken down into partial solutions and iteratively evaluated and optimised. The focus is on keeping the requirements as ‘lean’ as possible without compromising the user experience. Not all ideas are implemented, but only the most important ones ensure that the project is successful. The prioritised functions are developed using the Lean UX method (Think – Make – Check). Approaches to solving problems are generated (Think), which are tested in simulations or prototypes (Make) with experts and end users (Check). The insights gained are incorporated into the subsequent iteration or the final solution. A drastic reduction in documentation and specifications as well as short communication channels and fast approval processes are crucial.

Sustainability meets UX design

‘Green energy’, the knowledge of renewable energy sources, their utilisation and development, as well as their conscious use, are essential for the future. The reduction in subsidies for renewable energies has led to a considerable decline in the photovoltaic market and in investments in new systems. Suppliers and installers must step out of the established B2B2C marketing and develop new value creation networks. The direct route to the end customer (B2C) requires precise planning and innovative products and services. New thinking in the area of business models and market positioning is just as necessary as the skills of user experience specialists in order to be successful on the market. The result of these considerations is the realisation of the first global community portal for private solar system owners. As part of an agile UX design process and with the support of design thinking approaches, end customer needs were identified and consistently realised. The aim was to give a solar system and its operator a ‘face’. The user is supported by simple, self-explanatory functions and a platform for exchanging information with other users and experts.

Technical challenge and integration

A special feature in the development of the community portal was the close link to an existing solar portal (SMA Sunny Portal) and the challenge of treating the specialist visualisations with respect while offering the community target group a new portal and user experience. An inventory of over 180,000 PV systems in the existing portal opened up an estimated subset of around 30,000 small to medium-sized PV systems that could potentially be transferred to the new portal by the system owner or their installer with a single click. A central task was the design of realistic ‘simulated PV systems’, which creates a WIN-WIN-WIN situation for those interested in PV, solar installers and the portal provider or producer of inverter technology. This simulation gives interested parties an introduction to the world of PV and enables them to estimate what yield can be achieved with which system at their location and to what extent independence from energy suppliers and electricity price increases can be achieved. The regional installer can win new customers through these simulations and the inverter manufacturer can adapt or optimise its product strategy by evaluating the data and user behaviour.

Strategic planning

Against the backdrop of changes in the subsidy market for solar systems and renewable energies, the need to develop new services and products was recognised in order to address end users more directly and retain their loyalty. The initial starting point was a business model ideation for strategic brainstorming. In addition to a detailed benchmark of portals in the areas of solar technology, renewable energies, social media and community portals, an analysis of the best practices of international portals was also carried out in advance. To analyse requirements from a user perspective, target groups were identified and a comprehensive environment analysis was carried out with contextual focus interviews on the areas of system monitoring, yield and self-consumption optimisation in conjunction with community functionalities. In a third step, the results were evaluated together with experts from portal development, product management and marketing & sales in a total of 10 focus groups and a further 25 guideline interviews, merged and documented in the form of a strategic positioning of the portal and contextual requirements management.

Agile development

The approach in an agile development process differs fundamentally from traditional procedures. It favours flexibility and adaptation rather than implementing extensive planning at the start of a project. The core characteristics of an agile approach are adaptive planning and short-term coordination within the project team. In the planning phase at the start of the project, only two-week sprint phases were agreed, in which the current activities and responsibilities, project milestones with status, planned activities for the next sprint and the assessment of current project risks were documented.

User-centred development and usability

The concept phase was characterised by an iterative approach and the involvement of experts and potential users. Prototypical personas were defined on the basis of requirements management, and use cases were developed based on their user and utilisation requirements. These personas were, for example, solar system owners, solar technicians & operators, investors and interested parties. These personas were iterated and refined in expert workshops, and the design of the portal application, the clarification of dependencies and the optimisation of processes were developed in a ‘cognitive walkthrough’. Together with the stakeholders in the company, prioritisation and migration planning was carried out for three release stages as the basis for the requirements specification and the derivation of user stories.

Information architecture and user interface design

Card sorting was used to develop the navigation structure in order to facilitate the structuring and derivation of functional units. Closely linked to the navigation structure is the iterative development of structure and system trees for the overall application and individual complex components, such as PV system allocation or management. In parallel, the information architecture was developed iteratively in the form of wireframes and the user interface design with the creation of variants along defined usage scenarios and used to check the requirements and user experience in user testing. The results supported the creation of ‘click flows’ in the application context. The realisation of these ‘click flows’ as interactively usable ‘click dummies’ in HTML programming was the basis for the subsequent user experience and prototype tests.