We joined a company that has already been in the solar industry for several years, selling customer leads to solar companies through a self-built software. Their goal was to design a product for their niche CRM.

This product was conceived to respond to the specific requirements of solar companies during the commercial journey from beginning to end, obviously integrated with their self-built software as the main lead source. We worked along with the in-house team to design a human-centered product to unify and replace the multiple tools currently used in the different stages of this process. This includes from lead management in the early commercial stages, to system design and proposal preparation, to the post-sell installment process.

When our UX team was onboarded to the project, the development team had already started working on a first version of the product using a UI template kit. We had three initial big challenges:

• Making room for a research phase to gather insight for future decisions on an already moving project
• Working with the rest of the product team to conceive a solid MVP that proved the product’s value without having to develop the full range of features originally envisioned in the product.
• The product team was spread in significantly different places and time zones, so having clear roadmaps, efficient asynchronous collaboration techniques, and robust documentation was going to be necessary for the project to flow smoothly.

We started with research on 3 fronts:

• Analysis of the competitors’ proposal-creating tools and proposal contents.
  
  

This analysis allowed us to come up with a generic information architecture table which we then used to identify interests and needs in the interviews with homeowners and sales agents.
• 1 to 1 interviews with solar agents and team managers.
  
  A deeper understanding of the current workflows and tools they were using was heavily influential in the scope of the MVP and further prioritization of features. These interviews also introduced us to the wide range of team types and therefore different user profiles we would have to work with
• 1 to 1 interviews with homeowners who were interested in going solar

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  Though homeowners are not among the platform’s users, acknowledging their mental models, expectations, habits, and fears was very helpful to envision the challenges sales agents might face in the sales process so we could work on a tool that contemplated the pain points of the sale process.

Though homeowners are not among the platform’s users, acknowledging their mental models, expectations, habits, and fears was very helpful to envision the challenges sales agents might face in the sales process so we could work on a tool that contemplated the pain points of the sale process.

While the designs were still based on the original UI template, we built a modular library with the used template components and the new ones that were created. This library also included a prototype section that portrayed the behavior of the main components, to facilitate hand-off to the development team. Also, to soften the hard-data-management look, we added an illustrator to the team and worked on custom user-friendly components for the key elements of the system.

Once the first lead-management prototypes were ready, we also conducted user testing interviews with the solar agents we had interviewed in the beginning.

After one year, the ongoing design process came to a maturity stage where the company decided it was ready to start handling design 100% in-house. We were happy to hand off the project after accomplishing a set of milestones that would make the onboarding of a new team definitely easier:

• Thorough documentation of the research phase, including interview scripts, techniques, and registration forms
• An indexed and scalable library of components and behaviours
• Versions 1 and 2 of the product fully designed and prototyped
• A carefully designed asynchronous hand-off process along with documentation of file organisation, design stages, and all design processes.