Steven Hien – Tesla

Tesla

Illuminating the way to solar adoption for homeowners

About Tesla Energy

Tesla Energy's mission is to bring solar to homeowners in an attractive package. The team was ready to unveil their cutting-edge products the Solar Tile and the Powerwall to the market. The big question was: how well will customers adopt an ultramodern physical product through a digital experience?

The Challenge

Tesla tasked us to redesign the purchasing experience for their new products, and examine what motivates people to buy solar products over the web.

Design Team

Direction
Jef Bekes
Tony Glorioso

Design
Chris Sanders
Gianna Giancarlo

My Role
Product Designer

Deliverables

Audits
User Flows
Journey Maps
Personas
Wireframes
Prototypes
Responsive Web

Research

We spent four weeks collaborating with the Tesla Energy team in conducting stakeholder interviews, market research, and user insights to understand the unique requirements of their products and customers.

Landscape Audit

Competitive Analysis

We looked at how direct competitors, such as Google's Project Sunroof, appealed to their customers with data visualizations and interactive tools.

Best Practices

We also examined how indirect competitors, such as Jaguar's car configurator, encourage users to image physical products through playful visual means.

Learnings

Educate along the way
‍

Demonstrate the value proposition of Tesla’s solar products every step along the user journey with pertinent information and data. Interactivity encourages users to engage with the offerings.

Explore without commitment

Allow users to explore and save configurations without creating an account. Separating configuration from sales recognizes that these are two important but distinct parts of the customer journey.

Clear path forward
‍

Open many entry points across appropriate channels for users to play and ultimately convert. Ensure that call-to-actions and next steps are clear to the user.

Personas

Digital Native

The Digital Native is a first-time or second-time home buyer. He prefers to communicate through digital platforms and is used to getting tasks done in bits and pieces over time. He will most likely use a lease or loan to pay for the solar tiles.

Practicalist

The Practicalist has owned a home before. She understands the investment opportunity that solar presents. She has seen her neighbors get solar panels and will mostly likely ask them for advice and references.
‍

DIY-er

The DIY-er takes pride in getting things done without a lot of outside help. They will do a fair amount of research, both online, in person, and through word-of-mouth before making a decision.
‍
‍

Approach

We spent eight weeks working through wireframes and testing hi-fidelity prototypes after analyzing how the customer will move through the sales funnel by mapping out the steps during the initial sales process leading up to an on-site audit.w

Design Tenets

Provide value proposition with interactive configurator and calculator

Provide clarity around next steps and call-to-actions

Give the user a communication preference

Build confidence by showing accurate data and pricing

Offer optional "advanced" sections that improve quote and proposal confidence

Execution

We spent six weeks developing visual mockups to realize a playful yet practical responsive web experience (across mobile, tablet, and desktop) with careful consideration of both the digital and physical aspects of Tesla’s cutting-edge products.

Outcomes

The primary goal of this project was to test the market’s reception of Tesla’s new products by delivering a compelling, hype-worthy web experience. We successfully spurred press not only in the tech sphere but in architecture and business as well, consequently netting more product reservations from new customers. We delivered a compelling digital experience that aligned with Tesla’s customers’ needs and the Tesla brand.

Retrospective

Our work was well received by the client and their customers. Though, I believe we could have pushed for more user interactivity for a more engaging end user experience. Going forward, I helped introduce a new methodology for creating design vision in order to drive greater creative ambitions and generate excitement and buy-in from our clients and internal teams.