MyEnlighten Solar Monitoring

Empowers homeowners with the ability to monitor their solar power system.

Overview

Background

Enphase Energy designs and manufactures home energy solutions that include solar generation, energy storage, and web-based monitoring. Their responsive solar monitoring web application, MyEnlighten, provides homeowners with the ability to monitor their system’s energy production and home energy consumption.

Goal

Our high-level goals were to:

  • Make it easy to gauge whether their solar investment is paying off.

  • Help homeowners understand their energy usage.

Role

My roles for this project:

  • User Research

  • Sketches & Wireframes

  • Prototyping

  • Usability Testing

  • Implementation Support

In addition, I worked closely with:

  • UI Designer

  • UX Manager

  • Front-End Engineer

  • Product Manager

Challenge

Once a homeowner installs an Enphase solar energy system, there is no way to gauge if their solar investment is paying off. Their only way to know is to use the solar production data available on MyEnlighten and compare it with the consumption data provided by the power company. However, this becomes a time-consuming process and a headache.

Solution

We designed a new dashboard that includes an overview of the solar system’s progress and daily energy use pattern of a household. Homeowners are now able to gauge if their investment into solar is paying off by seeing if their energy use habits is affecting the net energy.

Homeowners responded well to the new dashboard. We measured the satisfaction score using our in-app feedback tool, and we were able to increase the satisfaction score from 6.64 to 7.58 (+14%)

Design Process

Research

Interviews

I wanted to understand what motivated homeowners to log in to MyEnlighten. I conducted one-on-one interviews with MyEnlighten users from the local Petaluma area.

I also took advantage of other available resources:

  • Customer service representatives

  • Internal MyEnlighten users

Who We’re Designing For

Through the user interviews, I was able to identify three groups of users:

  • Economical homeowner - Wants to reduce or eliminate electricity bills.

  • Environmentalist homeowner - Wants to lessen carbon emissions by reducing their dependence on utility companies.

  • Hobbyist homeowner - Purchases a solar energy system for economical and/or environmental reasons, but mainly as a hobby.

Findings

  • Homeowners are motivated to log in to MyEnlighten to see a summary of how their system has been performing since their last session.

  • The more technical homeowners enjoyed diving into the details of their solar production data to learn how they may be able to better optimize their systems.

  • Some homeowners used their solar production data to compare with energy consumption data provided by their utility company to see if they are using more energy than they are producing.

  • Ultimately, they’d like to be able to answer the following question: “Is my solar energy system producing enough energy compared to how much I’m consuming?”

Example solar production data

Example PG&E bill data

Ideation

Sketches

After synthesizing the data and presenting the findings from the interviews with the project team, we were able to generate the following requirements:

  • Users should be able to see a summary view of their overall production and consumption.

  • Users should be able to see the behavior of the energy going in and out of their home.

  • Users should be able to see the difference between their production and consumption.

Here are some example sketches I drew to quickly iterate and generate discussion points with the rest of the team:

Wireframes

24 hour graph with diagram

24 hour graph with text

Circle graph only

Diagram only

Testing Concepts

Testing Initial Wireframes

I tested the 4 wireframe concepts with 7 participants. These participants were Enphase employees that were in support roles or non-technical roles.

Each participant were asked to:

  • Explain each design and the information it’s trying to convey.

  • Rate each concept based on understandability (5 = very easy to understand, 1 = very hard to understand).

Results

From the usability test sessions, we were able to learn the following:

  • Showing production and consumption on the same 24h graph helped participants with understanding the energy usage behavior throughout the day.

  • Concepts that provided a full picture of what happened throughout the day scored the highest.

  • Participants noted that the colors took time to learn, but once they figured out the color scheme, it helped with understanding the overall picture.

Prototyping

Medium-Fidelity Prototype

The results from the testing the initial wireframes were presented to the UX and PM team. We were able to use the learnings and brainstormed a new concept, which I was able to prototype the interaction in Axure.

Graph interaction prototype (Designed with Axure)

Testing Prototype

Prototype Testing

I worked with a front-end engineer to develop an interactive prototype based on my initial concepts. This interactive prototype used dummy data to populate the graphs.

To test this prototype, I recruited 6 users (4 external, 2 internal). During the test sessions, I had each participant complete a series of user tasks using the prototype:

  1. You have been home all day doing chores around the house, and you are wondering how much energy you have used today. Find how much energy you have used today.

  2. You notice it is a sunny day outside. You have been told by your solar installer that your solar energy system produces the most energy on sunny days. Find out how much energy your system produced today.

  3. You just finished the last of your chores, and you are wondering if you used or produced more energy today. Find out if you produced or used more energy today. How much more?

  4. You recall that you hosted a party on July 11th. You want to know if you used or produced more energy during the day of the party. Find out if you used or produced more energy on July 11th. How much more?

  5. Your guests started arriving at your party at around 6:15 - 6:30 pm. What was your production and consumption at that time? What was the difference between production and consumption?

Results

Task 1 required participants to use the Overview panel to understand the consumption for the day. This task took participants the longest to complete, an average of 50.3 seconds. Most participants thought they had to use the new 24-hour graph to solve the task, but after scanning the interface, they found out an easier way to solve the task is to use the Overview panel.

Tasks 2 and 3 required participants to use the same Overview panel to understand the production and net energy. It took an average of only 17.83s and 6.83s respectively to complete. This was not surprising because, at this point of the test, participants have already learned to use the Overview panel to understand their system’s progress for the day.

Task 4 required the participant to use the date picker and select “July 11th” to see the net energy for the day. This took participants an average of 10.67s to complete.

Task 5 required the participant to use the 24-hour graph and find the time range and process the information displayed to them (diagram on-hover). It took participants an average of 41.3s to complete. Participants mentioned that they had to do mental math to calculate the difference between production and consumption, which added to the completion time.

Not actual prototype screenshot.

Other Takeaways

  • It took participants some time to adjust to the updated interface, but once they learned the updated layout and color scheme, subsequent tasks were quicker to solve.

  • Users liked that they can associate the positive axis (production) as “good” and the negative axis (consumption) as “bad.”

  • The activity diagram and bar breakdown were helpful in helping participants understand the behavior of the solar energy system.

Conclusion

Release of Net Energy

This was a great project to be a part of. We were able to speak with our users to understand some of the problems they had and the questions they were trying to answer about their investment into solar. We were then able to build a feature that helped give them insight to answer those questions.

To measure success, we monitored the in-app customer feedback tool, Feedbackify. This tool allows users to submit feedback and provide a rating of how satisfied they are with MyEnlighten. We were able to increase the satisfaction score from 6.64 to 7.58 (+14%)

I left the company shortly after the release of this feature, but I stayed updated with the changes to the product. Even though updates were made to the design, I’m glad to see the core concept of the feature we envisioned and developed remained the same.

Net Energy feature

Discussed in PV Magazine

It Lives On