Project Goals
Aurora Solar’s platform enabled users to create highly accurate solar system designs, but they had to export those designs and spend many hours manually creating plan set documents outside of the software. The project aimed to automate plan set creation by transforming system design data into customizable, permit-ready architectural documents within the Aurora platform.
Problem
Solution
My Process
- Gather requirements: Outline regulatory standards and rules for plan set compliance in various jurisdictions throughout the United States.
- Discovery workshops: Lead interactive workshops with internal stakeholders to uncover pain points and common use cases, discuss solutions, and determine priorities.
- User research: Interview solar professionals and internal subject matter experts to understand the end-to-end process of solar projects as well as specific plan set tasks.
- Ideate: Sketch flows and create wireframes to pin down information architecture and dependencies.
- Feedback: Solicit feedback from a wide variety of stakeholders to meet all business requirements.
- Refine: Use feedback to iterate until we had the desired, lean initial solution.
- Ship: Work closely with engineers to build and ship the final designs.
Research & Analytics
In a highly technical industry and complex problem space, it was important that I spend time gathering information about solar projects from sales pitch to installation.
- Regulatory research: Understand regulatory standards and rules for compliance in various jurisdictions throughout the United States.
- Expert consultation: Consult with internal subject matter experts regarding solar industry standards and best practices, both in regards to plan set documents and broader solar installation processes.
- User interviews: Understand actual user needs and requirements through direct conversations with a variety of solar professionals.
- Amplitude data: Review quantitative data on existing user behavior to find gaps in the current experience, particularly around AHJs.
Core Principles
Data accuracy
- Ensure that AHJ requirements database is up to date and accurate
- Give users confidence that they can trust the automated requirements for the jurisdictions
Customizability
- Allow users to correct or customize requirements for specific situations
- Enable users to provide additional notes and data for their own uses
Permit readiness
- Show users what codes will be enforced so they know what to do to prevent rejected permits
- Give users information ahead of time to expedite permitting processes
Project Execution
This project required a significant amount of discovery to be done upfront and quickly. I began by leading discovery workshops with internal stakeholders and subject matter experts, collaborating with a ux researcher to interview solar plan set specialists, and gathering data using analytics tooling to understand current user activity. With a better understanding of the business requirements and user needs, I began diagramming workflows and sketching UI concepts in order to arrive at a solution that would be lean and extensible, gathering feedback from colleagues and testing with users. Once I arrived at an approved final solution, I worked closely with engineers across various teams to build the design and any necessary dependencies.
Result
In the six months that I worked on this project, I was able to research, design, iterate, test, and ship three pieces of the overall automated plan set functionality: site plans, labels and placards, and specification sheets (as well as line diagrams, which I picked up and finished from a previous designer). I also worked on a related project to establish a more robust and accurate AHJ database, which would feed data to the automated plan sets. The MVP solution we released was able to instantly produce a permit-ready plan set for our targeted initial jurisdiction; a task that could have taken a plan set designer 1-8 hours to complete manually.
