Solar Texas

Interconnection Services

Connecting people, power, and process.

Interconnection Services

Interconnection undergoes a digital transformation from spreadsheets to an experience.

  • Working cross-functionally with several business departments, multiple end-users personas, and our UX design department, I am developing a new service for users who want to interconnect to the Texas power GRID.
  • As the UX Design Lead, I am developing a customer experience to create a seamless journey across, mobile to desktop devices, internal and external processes, and adhering to legal binding protocols.
  • Interconnection Service brought our user community from a paper, spreadsheet, and email out of date service to an innovative online customer experience. This new-to-market product saves everyone money, time, and effort!

Inerconnection

Previous Interconnection Service

PROBLEM

  • The instructions are overwhelming and complicated to follow.
  • The process takes years, so the users couldn't gauge and remember where they were in the process.
  • The users didn't feel there was much value add to providing the information.
  • Creating and submitting is expensive and time consuming for the user.
  • Our internal staff of engineers couldn't understand why our external users didn't love to provide data.
  • There is no immediate validation. Users submit their spreadsheets over and over and over until an engineer deems them correct.

Interconnection!

Research

Research Your Design
Research Your Design
Research Your Design

Research Findings High Points

External Users

  • Users didn't try and follow the process documentation on the public website. They resort to calling the company to figure out the next steps and status.
  • Users only create this content to send to the company. So, they sent the information they thought would pass validation vs. actual data.

Internal Users

  • The internal user all had a different understanding of the service and its steps. They describe overlap and vast differences in the interconnection services process.

ISO's Competitive Analysis

  • California ISO has clear steps depicted for their interconnections.
  • Our company collects more data than all the ISO's interviewed.
  • None of the ISO's are doing the service entirely online.
  • None of the ISO's interviewed had a straightforward way to communicate status to the users.

Big Form Analysis

  • Appropriately chunking data and topics. Then providing stepping stone reviews entwined and a final evaluation.
  • Sparingly use progressions to indicate the completeness of the form, seen as a demotivator vs. motivator.
  • Sophisticated forms allow users to answer invalid questions on the summary at the end of the process. The follow-up question provides just enough context to explain, without having the user return to earlier pages.
  • Make starting and stopping easy.

I just want a quick, easy process to follow!

~External User

External User Personas

Update Personas

Based on the interviews, the design team updated the external and eternal personas who will be using this service. We referred to them throughout the entire product development process.

Customer Journey

In preparation for our services design workshop, the design team built hypothetical Customer Journeys

  • Interconnection service is a new product. I had the UX team run a workshop to get a hypothetical journey map
  • During the workshop, we mapped one journey per persona
  • We use resulting journeys in the service design workshop as the backbone of the service

External User Personas
Service Design Workshop

Service Design Workshop

Service Design Workshop

Workshop

The design team ran ran a two-day long workshop, day one working through the "as-is, and then day two expanding to the "to-be" service for Interconnection Services.

Resulting In

  • Define characteristics for the product.
    Dynamic Transparent Efficient Reliable Helpful Smart
  •  Buyin across departments at for a unified internal process?
  •  Definition of epics and stories for minimum viable product - MVP
  •  See my full process on the UX to CX page

Translating Stickies into Lasting Artifacts in miro
Service Desgin Artifact

Towards the end of a project, I capture the workshop artifacts in a digital format. It is essential to keep the format and translation as accurate to the original as possible. Making it match everyone's mental model of work they helped create. Sticky's created artifacts eventually wear out. I keep our forever history documents in digital. Above is a miro documentation of our service design. Our originals hang on the product team walls, usually until the sticky's fall off.

UXpin high fidelity wireframe

Wireframes

Low fidelity wireframes get created during the first part of a sprint. They come from either user interviews, design thinking sessions, or both. They are quickly gorilla tested and iterated on in the low-fi format. Next, Key stakeholders, developers, and product managers participate in convergent design review, and we iterate if necessary. Wireframes next get a high fidelity wireframe and documentation in both flow and interaction.

RIOO-IS Launches December of 2018!

Creating a service where the project and the service spans years is rewarding, complicated, and at times, frustrating.

  • The user community had waited over ten years for this service, and the expectations were high for advance features and a quick launch of the service.
  • I managed the expectations though over allowing user participation. Users participated in workshops, reviews, and UX testing. Key stakeholders are involved in the prioritization and choices of what is in and out of the MVP.

Everyone had a sense of pride and ownership on launch day.

"Applications rose from 17 to 150 a year!"

270
Wireframes
1500+
Completed Stories
100+
Backlog Stories
150+
Interconnections