Green energy
Automated workflow for environmental certificates
Confidential
Outcome
Reducing operational risk and the complexity of the renewable energy market for 5000+ clients worldwide, in 40+ countries, and counting.
More than 168TWh of renewable energy supplied that translates into 48M tons CO2 offset in 2022.
Accelerating access to sustainable energy and making businesses future-proof.
Role
Leadership
Product Strategy
User Research
Prototyping & Testing
Visual design
Challenge
The top challenge was with regards to the infrastructure and information structure and data quality.
Decentralised EAC registries along with lack of a standardised data model forced us map out the most important and commonly useful data. Efforts were carried out to understand and match the diverse labelling systems and provide a coherent, normalised data model that seamlessly propagate cross-registries, accounts and product types, providing quality data sets that are easy to read and understand, combat the complexity, and decrease the cognitive loads on the customers.
Unlike the financial market, where most transactions are conducted electronically, much of the renewable energy certificate trade is still managed manually.
Trade and inventory management are still handled by outdated technology, such as spreadsheets, email, and phone calls.
This makes it difficult to share information across participants in a contract—information that may be crucial to negotiating new deals or resolving disputes. Contract negotiations are often slowed by the need for people on different teams to send each other PDFs via email and wait while others review them internally before approval can be given.
Value driven
Working closely with the product team, we scoped out customer journey and what they would need from the product. In line with further research we conducted and user interviews to help ensure we were designing and building the tools to assist them with helping deliver value to the customers.
Artefacts
Feature definition
Primary customer journeys
MVP Definition
Balancing User Needs with Business Goals
Our interview process didn’t just have a big impact on the product as a whole but also on its usability. The UX team narrowed it down to three crucial findings: create a common but improved journey, basing our design on this journey makes it easier for users to adapt to the platform and organise their tasks better; use frameworks users are familiar with; introduce small changes that can have significant effects.
The initial user research uncovered various areas of opportunity, such as content discovery based on genres, moods, or a combination of the same.
However, for the MVP, I kept in mind the business goals and organisational capacity and decided to focus upon some key areas, including simplifying user experience around user on-boarding, discovery and assets management, and thereby, meeting user and business goals including key engagement and user retention, with a strong focus on, discoverability for what they need to do starting with acquisition and ending with selling or adding to the portfolio.
Synthesis: Journey Mapping
Setting the Structure
I refined the concept with research outcomes in-line with our business goals and went through a few rounds of iteration. I also came up with a revised and simplified information architecture that focused on content discovery.
We managed to provide a streamlined process that allows our customers to eliminate repetitive processes and save time. They receive clear notifications and certainty that all steps have been completed correctly and in the trade-settlement process.
In the absence of standardised procedures and data, with a lot of processes done manually, it is hard to have a good workflow. As the renewable energy certificates market grows and becomes more complex the solution comes in aid to automate the workflow. People involved in the process get notified when to take steps so that nothing gets forgotten. We normalised and optimised data so that now we offer valuable and reliable data to our customers.
Also, the platform offers standard contract templates to avoid reinventing the wheel for every new trade or counterparty that make the trade agreements processed and signed faster.
Scalable Design System
Created a complete design system from scratch for this digital product, enabling us to scale the platform and add new features while maintaining a consistent look and feel.
Complete Control and Visibility
All-in-one
Seamless integration with registries APIs – to pull in data and display it where you can get an at-a-glance view of the portfolio, trades and predictions. This is all from one portal rather than multiple applications.
No matter the input source the data looks and reads the same
While the app integrates seamlessly with API-enabled registries, managing inventory from registries that don’t have an API is also possible.
This allows the users to consolidate their data in one place in one standardised and normalised view.
Did you know that a single website visit takes up an average of 1.67 grams of CO²?
Design for Energy Efficiency.
Use simple colour palette and avoiding excessive use of animations or other visual elements that require high levels of processing power.
This web page is cleaner than 79% of web pages tested.
Only 0.20g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits my web page.
© 2023 by Alexandru Botezatu