Integrating Electric Vehicle Ownership with Home Solar
Product Designer at Sunrun, 2021 - 2022
Designing a pathway from Ford F-150 Lightning ownership to integrated home energy systems
Sunrun, Ford's exclusive partner for at-home EV charger installations, wanted to leverage its partnership to cross-sell solar and battery systems to Ford F-150 Lightning drivers. Our goal was to design an intuitive e-commerce experience that seamlessly integrated these complementary offerings.
I co-led a cross-functional team of service and interaction designers, visual designers, and user researchers. Initially, my role was foundational—shaping the general e-commerce design vision for Sunrun's flagship solar and battery services. As strategic alignment with Ford emerged, I shifted my focus entirely to leading the Ford partnership design stream.
Designing an EV-to-Solar Pipeline
Illustrating the power of home energy integration
Help Ford F-150 Lightning customers prepare their homes for an energy transformation.
As Ford’s exclusive installation partner for the F-150 Lightning home charger, Sunrun sends customers a gated link via email once their vehicle is in production. Users land on a page that clearly explains how their new electric truck fits into a larger energy ecosystem connecting their vehicle, home, rooftop solar panels, and battery storage. This integrated system provides reliable backup power and lower, predictable energy bills. A clear call-to-action encourages users to schedule their charger installation, ensuring their homes are fully prepared by the time their truck arrives.
iterating on future-facing design components
Putting self-service patterns to the test
A mobile-first approach set us up for self-service experiences down the design roadmap.
A mobile-first approach allowed us to pinpoint essential information and streamline our design in the absence of a fully developed design system. In testing with users and working with engineers, we were also able to establish responsive variants to both existing and new components.
This project also marked our design team’s first chance to incorporate elements from a recent brand refresh into existing components, ensuring consistency with other customer-facing experiences while evolving the visual identity.
We embedded the cross-sell without derailing the core user journey.
To support broader business goals without disrupting the main user flow, we added a middle step between users entering their identifying information and scheduling their charger installation. This optional step offered users the chance to learn more about expanding their setup into a full home energy system with rooftop solar and battery storage. Through iterative usability tests with EV-interested consumers (proxies for our real users), we found that progressively introducing this option earned a positive response. Users appreciated having the opportunity to explore the broader possibilities of their F-150 without feeling forced off track from completing their primary task.
Persist pricing and terms at every step.
A bottom sheet we call the "pricing drawer" accrues contextual details about the user's offer as they progress through product selections until checkout. A pricing breakdown and concise terms remain accessible without distracting from the main content.
Navigating ambiguity
Managing gaps in data visibility
Clear documentation became our anchor in a constantly shifting product landscape.
As the partnership between Ford and Sunrun evolved, product and design requirements changed daily—sometimes hourly. To lead through this ambiguity, I created living user flows that became a shared reference for product and business stakeholders. Alongside this, I maintained an active changelog to document design-related decisions and emerging insights as they unfolded. This flexible documentation made it easier for multiple teams to stay connected to the latest developments and ensured that we could move forward even as conditions kept changing. Over time, my team formalized this into a service blueprint to scale alignment across the organization.
We handled missing vehicle data without breaking user trust.
Because our backend couldn’t reliably confirm whether a vehicle order was valid or simply not ready for charger installation, we faced a challenging edge case: users could land on our portal when we lacked Ford's data on whether they should move forward. Instead of blocking access or falsely rejecting qualified customers, we designed conditional error states that flexed based on what we could confirm. Users who tried to schedule installations too early were presented with clear next steps, framed to keep them engaged rather than completely turned away. This approach preserved user trust and handled backend uncertainty without majorly disrupting the experience.
Improving Cross-Functional Collaboration
Streamlining communication channels
We introduced a new system for overseeing design implementation.
To keep alignment tight with engineers around a single source of truth, I assembled all mockups, variants, and interaction flows within Zeplin. A lightweight spreadsheet with an automated file naming system helped us organize each UI state and condition consistently, providing utmost clarity during implementation. We received positive feedback from engineers and our product counterparts on this method of delivery.
