Improving the customer experience

As UX designer on this project, I played a pivotal role in transforming our customer app to better serve our users. I helped to define and design a unified solar timeline and build a comprehensive design library from the ground up to align our product needs with our brand guidelines. These efforts significantly improved how customers track and manage their solar projects, offering them enhanced transparency and engagement.

The home for our customer app orients customer to their project status and gives them action items to dive into their project, or options to explore more about Lumio.

Vision

Our goal was to improve the experience by rethinking our customer app. We aimed to create a one-stop shop to improve the onboarding process, with the centerpiece being a unified solar timeline. This timeline would provide transparency and detailed information about each step in the solar journey, ultimately transforming how customers engage with and monitor their projects

Additionally, we were asked to make the app a marketing opportunity for our sales team, giving potential customers a personalized space to explore more about the company and the solar installation process. The app would outline access to support, display Lumio’s extensive footprint, and highlight its credibility and processes.

Process

Our team began by interviewing groups across the company to gather perspectives and identify existing issues at customer touch points. We conducted working sessions, bringing in additional stakeholders and leadership from across the company to map out user journeys, identify pain points, and pinpoint the largest areas of friction as customers moved through different stages of their project.

We collected current messaging, collateral, and content from different customer interactions to build an outline of where, when, and how customers were being communicated with. We then worked with those groups to align the disparate information into a singular solar timeline.

Customer journey workshop.

Each existing task in the process was scrutinized and refined to provide the customer with the best context for what they should expect during each step of the process. The tasks were categorized into groups to help define major milestones or handoff points in their project, ultimately giving the customer a clear picture of the overall progress of their project.

Once we had clearly defined the primary output for the product, the design team and I worked to wireframe, conceptualize, and prototype our first model of the customer experience. In addition to the design of the interface of the app itself, I worked to build a design library from the ground up that aligned our product needs with our customer facing brand guidelines—iterating on both over the following months to create a project portal that each customer would be guided into as soon as they expressed interest in solar.

The solar timeline.

Throughout the process, we worked closely with our marketing group to align the product strategy with the messaging delivered to customers, welcoming them into this new experience and helping orient them within this complex web of processes.

Screens from across the customer app.

Summary

Solar installations can be some of the most complex projects in the residential space. Building systems and alignment around the complex processes proved to be a long and complicated journey. The result was a clear timeline that became the centerpiece of a customer app, giving customers the best overview of their project. This also laid the foundation for a product that could evolve over time to include more features and add more value to the customer as the company’s offerings grew.