Multi-portal Web Infrastructure for IoT Device Monitoring and Data Management
As a designer on this project, I collaborated with an innovative manufacturer of modular solar photovoltaic storage hardware and renewables to design a comprehensive end-to-end software infrastructure to support their sustainable and off-grid living solutions featuring IoT connectivity.
This infrastructure was critical to achieve the strategic objectives in the key areas:
Market Leadership and Customer Experience:
In a competitive and rapidly growing market for direct to consumer renewable energy solutions, this project was an opportunity to position the business as an industry leader providing innovative, data-driven solutions that elevated the customer experience.
Operational Excellence and Customer Loyalty:
Leveraging the software experience to match the caliber of hardware, making a lasting impact and building customer loyalty across the pipeline of dealers, consumers, and partner administrators.
Brand Promotion and Market Expansion:
Expanding market reach and consumer awareness of the brand, generating sales leads and creating a memorable and lasting touchpoint, creating market differentiation.
After a series of immersive discovery sessions with key stakeholders, the defined project scope needed to include:
A comprehensive and user-friendly dashboard with live monitoring and visualizations of time-series energy and battery data to be used by customers, dealers, and business administrators
Billing tools for handling utility payments between property owners and their tenants, and scheduling tools for controlling battery usage based on time and weather
CRM capabilities for business administrators and their product dealers to manage allocation of batteries and set up high-level product performance monitoring and aggregation
A sleek and modern marketing and lead generation website for product promotion
As a method to set the right context and foundation for design decisions, I developed a deeper understanding of who our primary users were. This meant researching existing users and competitive analysis to form role-based user personas.
High-level user flow and feature map
By collaborating with business and technical stakeholders, I was able to clearly define these user personas and their behaviors and objectives. This was a fundamental in order to map out a user flow through each application portal. At this stage, all key features were worked into the user flow and it became clear what data would need to be shared between portals.
Admin portal for managing users, roles, and monitoring devices
With each portal clearly defined, it was necessary to validate the user requirements with real data. Using real data provided a foundation to drive iterations of visual designs and was crucial in identifying technical limitations early in the product development process, saving days of development time and allowing for an aggressive production timeline.
Property owner portal for monitoring battery stats, managing tenants and billing
Creating a robust component library, maintained using Sketch and React, was important to ensure consistency and usability across portals. Upfront investment in creating a design system and component library made successive design iterations for UX improvements and the addition of new features seamless and easily scalable.
Sample pages from marketing and lead generation sites
After the release of this project, new pre-order model units sold out and the business was able to dovetail this success to focus on expansion into commercial-grade products. This design foundation continues to enable the business to position itself as a market leader and improve its customer experience, loyalty, and operational excellence.