Designing Home Solar
Product Designer at Sunrun, 2020
Redesigning Sunrun's solar proposal builder to improve sales effectiveness
At Sunrun, solar consultants rely on the web-based Design & Price tool to build and pitch personalized residential solar and storage proposals. Created to help them navigate complex configurations and break down costs, Design & Price is essential to delivering the company’s sales talk track and securing a homeowner’s buy-in. Yet instead of making the decision-making process seamless and straightforward, the tool’s initial design was producing cognitive overload, inconsistent customer experiences, and lost opportunities to generate more business.
Collaborating with a CX design strategist, I proactively led a redesign to tackle critical user challenges while aligning with evolving business needs. I pitched a high-level design vision that secured sales leadership buy-in, mapped out a design and implementation roadmap in collaboration with product and engineering, and established a more user-centric, design-driven development model within the Sales Platform team.
The process involved
Changing processes that precluded design improvements
Product processes within the Sales Platform team, which oversaw the Design & Price experience, were broken. As a result of lacking cross-functional alignment, continuous neglect for critical usability problems, and a flawed prioritization framework in which isolated feedback shaped development sprints, the Design & Price experience failed over time to meet major user needs and business objectives alike.
To drive meaningful change, I built a case for a holistic redesign addressing both current and emerging challenges. Instead of responding to requests for context-blind fixes, I compiled interconnected UX issues from our backlog alongside new updates in equipment and financing operations. Conversations with engineering revealed that many “reusable” patterns were in fact hard-coded bespoke tweaks, forcing extensive development effort for every change.
I presented this case and a proposed roadmap to key stakeholders, including the VP of Sales Operations and the Sales Platform PM, and secured buy-in to re-establish the foundation of Design & Price. Weekly alignment check-ins ensured our redesign remained grounded in user research and business strategy while keeping communication open around sales operations updates.
Discovering user workarounds, missed opportunities, and product ambiguities
Shadowing consultations and interviewing both consultants and homeowners revealed widespread workarounds. Consultants manipulated the Design & Price page to force a linear conversation or reverted to referencing jargon-filled PDF proposals. Homeowners resorted to spreadsheets for comparing technical specifications, often in a way that overlooked Sunrun’s competitive advantage in system maintenance and servicing.
Early insights prompted us to further examine touch points before and after the sales appointment. We uncovered a missed opportunity to leverage customer preference data for proposal filtering and recognized a need to support cost-benefit comparisons, especially for systems with versus without storage. At the same time, new system limitations and an undefined yet imminent shift towards omnichannel e-commerce demanded a flexible, responsive redesign, one that extended from reusable components to a coherent, adaptable interface for both seasoned consultants and first-time solar homeowners.
Rapid prototyping and collaboration for scalability
Driven by our user insights and early concepts, we launched an iterative design process with biweekly prototype tests involving homeowners, consultants, and sales managers, occasionally looping in other relevant business stakeholders to gather additional feedback and elucidate any remaining gaps. I partnered closely with engineering on a concurrent initiative to consolidate a component library for Sales Platform once and for all. With designers overseeing other products, I workshopped emerging design patterns and use cases to ensure their visibility and scalability. The process culminated in a complete redesign of the proposal creation and presentation experience, one that addressed current pain points while anticipating needs for possible omnichannel e-commerce integration.
The redesign Improves
Clarity
Progressively disclose project details, garnering buy-in every step of the way.
From day one of their training, solar consultants are drilled to get the "Three Yeses" from homeowners on 1) system design, 2) financial product, and 3) pricing in that order to create buy-in on their offer. Yet the original UI was overloaded with information displaying all three configurations at once with no clear hierarchy and competing calls to action.
In the redesign, a linear flow through the steps mirrors this framework to better help consultants set expectations, uplift often overlooked areas of value that Sunrun has to offer, and create a more consistent consultation experience.
Dynamically reflect design changes and interdependent variables.
One of the nuances of the proposal generation process was that depending on the availability or type of equipment selected in step one, certain financial product selections in step two—whether it be signing a power purchase agreement with a Sunrun-owned system or financing self-ownership through a loan—would not be viable for Sunrun and therefore not offered.
A sticky, dynamically updating panel of the most important specifications in each step allows the users to track all effects of a certain selection and better compare choices.
Trust
Capture inquiry data while filtering proposals.
Replacing an obstructive and functionally obsolete site model confirmation step, the new "Energy Needs" step systemizes the documentation of customer preferences in the CRM and primes the homeowner for their system personalization.
By reiterating the homeowner's needs right before building their proposal in this way, consultants can highlight how their input directly affects the system's parameters. All proposals pre-generated in the backend would then be effectively filtered to display a single proposal to recommend starting in the next step.
Build trust through co-creation.
Frame the proposal with the value proposition.
Rather than present a complete proposal straightaway, the redesign allows the homeowner to take part in building the proposal while still receiving the consultant's expert guidance in real time.
This shifts the consultant's perceived role from sales representative to co-creator and instills greater trust in the proposal being right for them.
Empathy
Design for homeowners who need time to compare and decide.
Solar consultants aim to close deals in the first appointment, but homeowners often need time to review proposals with partners, compare providers, or consider future needs like a hot tub.
The redesign introduces a responsive, read-only proposal homeowners can revisit or share with a co-decision maker. Each proposal remains anchored to the home’s specific context and services, reinforcing why going solar makes sense.
If multiple proposals have been created, homeowners can now use a side-by-side comparison tool to consider different design or financing configurations.