Overview
As a designer for Blueprint, Technology for Nonprofits, I worked alongside 6 developers to create a web dashboard application for People Power Solar Cooperative, a nonprofit that provides resources for communities to take ownership of solar power, particularly low-income communities, communities of color, and frontline communities that have been disproportionately harmed by the fossil fuel industry. This dashboard creates the infrastructure for People Power Solar to formalize and scale up their processes as well as manage their members more easily as their organization continues to grow.
Context
One of my largest growth points from this project was the high learning curve that came with understanding the nonprofit’s role in accomplishing their mission of community-owned solar power in the context of the larger energy sector and the systemic complexities within it. In order to understand the value that I could bring to users, I engaged in a lot of dialogue with various stakeholders about People Power Solar Cooperative’s internal structure and processes.
Cooperative Structure
People Power’s cooperative structure is composed of project groups, which represent different communities (typically by geographic locations). Project groups operate as independent cooperatives, falling under People Power as an umbrella cooperative that provides technical, financial, and legal guidance to these project groups. Existing project groups under People Power include the East Oakland and Ingleside project groups.
Project Group Structure
Within each project group, there are General Owners, Subscriber Owners, and an Admin.General Owners in the project group invest in solar projects—properties with solar panels installed. Each solar project is owned by a Subscriber Owner. Admins manage the project group’s operations and communicate directly with People Power Solar Cooperative.
Constraints
After conducting initial research, I gathered the following constraints I needed to keep in mind while designing:
- Early Stages People Power Solar Cooperative is still growing, so many of the features needed to take this into account. For example, my initial instinct for Project Group selection during Onboarding was to display a map of existing project groups. However, since the cooperative is still in its early stages with only a few project groups, it ultimately made more sense to display the project groups as a list view.
- Legal Requirements Given the cooperative’s role in providing legal support for its project groups, a lot of my job was to translate these legal requirements into a fluid experience on the dashboard — for example, instead of having owners have to navigate through PDF links of legal material through email, embedding easily consumable pages into the Onboarding process.
Project
Within each project group, there are 3 groups of users that are relevant to the dashboard app. I conducted multiple user interviews to gather insights on the frustrations, needs and wants, and behavior of these user types. For continuity, the user groups are outlined below along with their respective Dashboard mockups.
General Owner
A General Owner of People Power Solar Cooperative is someone who invests in at least one share of the cooperative. Based on user interviews, the main takeaway for General Owners was desire for more financial transparency, knowledge of impact of their investment on the community, and more engagement with the rest of the community.
During Onboarding, Owners should be able to register themselves onto the platform and go through all the necessary onboarding processes to be an owner of the cooperative.
- Contact Information Owners provide their — name, email, phone number, address, and all other relevant contact information
- Terms and Agreement Owners click through and agree to the core sections of the Bylaws/Owner Agreement
- Project Group Selection Owners select their project group from the list of public groups that are taking investments
- Purchase Shares Owners select the number of shares they would like to buy, set their dividend preferences, and pay for their shares
After completing account registration through Onboarding, General Owners should be able to log in to their dashboard and have access to the following features:
- Investment Details Display of financial details about the Owner’s investment, including amount and return. Ability to review and update their current investment options, as well as buy more shares or request to divest. In addition, they can view the quantifiable benefit their investment has made.
- Solar Project Overview View information on the solar projects they are contributing to
- Events View upcoming events pertaining to the cooperative
Subscriber Owner
Subscriber Owners receive solar power from People Power Solar Cooperative and consequently, have to pay for the solar panels installed on their roof. From my conversations with Subscriber Owners, I gathered that the current method of paying bills via handwritten check was often tedious and an unclear process. Subscribers wanted a way to pay their bills online and also be able to see all of their past bills in one place.
Subscriber Owners should be able to log into their dashboard and have access to the following features:
- Bill Payment Clear payment flow for paying their bills
- Billing History View past transaction details
Admin User
Admins are essentially project group leaders; consequently, they are generally very passionate about the cooperative’s mission. Through user interviews, I gathered that Admin users were looking for a way to be able to send out announcements to their project group on an organized platform, and more importantly, keep members engaged and passionate about the cooperative’s mission.
Owners that are an Admin of a project group have access to:
- Manage Membership Add and remove members from the project group, add/edit/remove information about solar projects, and generate invitations based on pledge cards (physical forms that the cooperative currently uses to collect interest)
Iteration
The process of getting to the high-fidelity wireframes involved many intermediate steps of brainstorming solutions to the insights brought up through user research. In particular, some iterations of significance:
- Community Feed After conducting user interviews, I found that the initial project specifications’ focus on finances may not be able to meet the users’ real needs — in particular, I noticed that everyone I talked to expressed a strong desire to feel more connected with their community, even more so than viewing financial information about their investments. Although the initial project description included a feature for displaying upcoming events, user research suggested this was not enough. Thus, after a few conversations with the nonprofit, we decided to pivot and place the focus on “community,” thus leading to the creation of the Community feed. This feed provides a centralized source of information related to the project group, allowing owners to keep updated with new solar project updates and see the ongoing progress and flourishing of their solar-powered community.
- Displaying Solar Project Information The given project specifications listed “displaying quantifiable benefit made by investment.” During my first few sketches of the application, this section was always left as a big blank box. Many conversations with the nonprofit helped elucidate this world of solar energy that I was not well-versed in — ultimately, I learned a lot about electricity bill generation and sustainability equivalents of such jargon. Taking the insights from user research, I was able to create informed designs that translated data like kilowatt-hours into bite-sized carbon-emission reduction equivalencies, such as greenhouse gas emissions avoided by x bags of waste recycled instead of landfilled, or generated from x miles driven by an average passenger vehicle.
User Testing
After developing the first version of high-fidelity designs based on user research, I conducted multiple usability tests to validate and test the assumptions reflected in the product thus far.
Research Goals
- Validate high-level features: do they add value? What can we improve
- Pinpoint unclear and confusing flows
Method
- Moderated, remote user testing (via Zoom — sharing screen & remote control access)
Takeaways and Changes
Conducting user tests was an exciting process that highlighted areas for improvement as well as for further development. Along with smaller revisions to fix unclear and confusing user flows, the following outlines some larger changes:
- Charts and Data Visualizations Users responded positively to mockups of charts, expressing interest in seeing live data through these visualizations. This launched further research and development into the logistics and interaction of these charts. They include aggregated production data from solar project groups — kilowatt-hours (kWh) generated per month and overall, their translations into equivalencies; financial breakdown of how owners’ investments contribute to the project group and cooperative operations; and cost of using People Power’s solar power versus PG&E rates.
- Reallocating Space in Admin Dashboard Testing the Admin Dashboard revealed issues with clickability, particularly when trying to view members’ contact information. The existing use of space proved inefficient and called for a redesign of how members were displayed on the Dashboard.
Future Opportunities
Due to the constraints of our timeline and small size of our team, we weren’t able to address every takeaway that came up during user testing purely because they were not in scope of the MVP. However, they brought up interesting opportunities and directions that the application could take in the future:
- Visibility into multiple project groups Explore the possibility of allowing users to view information about multiple project groups, not just their own
- Expanding Admin Dashboard capabilities With the growth of project groups, it becomes clear that each project group may operate differently internally. Admins of project groups may take on roles that require deeper visibility than currently exists.
- Building in information about social benefits Although greenhouse gas statistics serve as a useful measure to quantify the environmental benefits, owners of the cooperative are also invested in the social outcomes — how is the community coming together? What are ways to measure and boost social growth?
Final
You can explore the final product on Figma Community!
Reflection
This project has been an incredible period of growth and rewarding work for me. I grew as a designer in many respects, but the most significant was the experience of building a design system: I explored the many powerful tools in Figma and learned best practices in using components, grids, and overall developer handoff. It was my first time working so closely with developers, which improved my design workflow through weekly sprints, taught me overall communication skills when it came to translating design into code, and exercised my ability to accommodate and foresee constraints on designs due to technical difficulty. I was also able to find design support with fellow designers at Blueprint, whom I met with weekly to discuss our respective projects. I grew much more comfortable with weekly critiques, learning how to receive and give more productive feedback with my design team.
One unique challenge I experienced during this project was having to work remotely during both semesters — the first of which, our Project Leader had to be remote for the duration of the semester, and the second semester having been cut short with the COVID-19 crisis. Working remotely led to limitations in both communication and motivation, but I am grateful for the circumstances as they led me to take stronger ownership of the product and grow much closer to our point of contact at the nonprofit — factors which ultimately improved the quality of the product.
Thanks for tuning in for an overview of this project! I’m happy to chat more in-depth about the details of my process — please feel free to reach out via irishou@berkeley.edu.
