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Megan Ly

Renewables for Retail

Duration: 10 weeks, June - August 2022

Role: UI Design, Wireframing, User Research, Prototyping

Tools: Figma, React, PowerBI

I worked as the sole designer on my team of software engineers to design a tool determining which bp retail sites are viable for small-scale wind turbines and solar panels.

CASE STUDY

40k retail sites. How many are viable for small-scale wind farming?

bp has tens of thousands of retail sites and wanted to harness the power of wind. Small-scale wind turbines are a promising source of energy, will help the company achieve its goal of net-zero emissions, and promote sustainability. But where is the best place to start piloting these turbines?

PROBLEM

3 unique user needs. 

I created personas after meeting with stakeholders. These personas capture the different needs that people had.

 

Decision Maker: "I want to know the ROIs for each site so that I can know which sites will be the most viable financially."

 

Wind Engineer: "I want to know the weather conditions each site so that I can know which sites will have the most ideal conditions for generating wind power."

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Strategic Planner: "I want to know the lot size and see what the landscape is near the site so that I can determine the ease of building a turbine at the site."

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Key Takeaways:

  • Uncovered new factors we hadn't considered in determining the viability of sites.

  • Validated assumptions we needed to make in our model.

USER STORIES

Building our React prototype.

Our first prototype was a full-stack application. I developed the front-end using bp's own component library to maintain brand consistency. 

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Some key features:

  • Search bar

  • Table

  • ROI viability metric

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Having a table with all the retail sites displayed with the viability metric would be sufficient for the MVP. It's a straightforward view of the data. 

Landing page with the data displayed in a table.

Modal box with details for each retail site.

PROTOTYPE I

Getting our ideas on paper (or iPad)!

We began sketching ideas. There are some key features we wanted to include that would align with users' needs:

 

  • Search function

  • A map with all retail site locations

  • Viability metric

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These features would give the user an easy way to make sense of the data.

WIREFRAMES

Sketch of our app.

Wireframe with feature notes.

Prototyping in PowerBI

Due to time constraints and after receiving upper-level management feedback, we decided to pivot to creating our application in PowerBI. 

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Benefits of PowerBI:

  • Direct integration to data sources

  • Powerful visualization tools

  • Maintainability of project for employees who are already familiar with PowerBI to continue our project after the internship ends.

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Key features:

  • Summary page to give a high level overview of insights from data including the number of the sites that have “green” viability and the countries with the highest number of viable sites.

  • Map view to show the locations of each retail site as well as metrics like ROI and yearly power generation (kWh).

  • Table for an alternative way for users to explore data.

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Dashboard Summary page.

Map page.

Table view.

PROTOTYPE II

Insights from 3 user tests

Throughout various points during the PowerBI dashboard development, I collected feedback from three stakeholders. Their comments helped us create multiple iterations and our team incorporated their concerts into our design process.

 

Takeaways:

  • Stakeholders wanted to know the countries with the most viable sites so we added a bar chart highlighting the top 5 countries on the summary page. 

  • Uncovered some bugs on the Map page.

  • Questions about assumptions made in our model for power generation led to the creation of a "Custom Calculator" feature that allows user to plug in numbers like average wind speed to view the viability. 

USER TESTS

Learning by doing. 

Strengths:

  • Had fun learning with my teammates and working on a real-world problem, especially focused on sustainability. 

  • Leveraged different skills like research, front-end development, working on a diverse team, and the user-centered design process to create a useful solution addressing a business problem.

 

Challenges:

  • Worried about my lack of technical skills since I had never used React or worked on a software team before. However, my peers and manager were super supportive and I was able to pick up React quickly. 

  • Difficulty identifying our users especially since we were designing an internal tool. I wasn’t sure who to engage with which made it difficult to envision the user journey. Next time, I would try to spend more time conducting user research to gain a clearer idea of our project requirements.

REFLECTION

A digital tool that displays viability metrics and other strategic data

Renewables for Retail is a tool aimed to help bp expand its renewable energy sector. Since stakeholders lacked information about what makes a site viable for wind energy, we began by learning about wind to determine factors that dictate the utility of wind turbines at specific locations. We created a digital tool to address this knowledge gap for our stakeholders. 

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Here's my process:

SOLUTION

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