Sunwise is a SAAS (Software as a service) that helps solar installers create solar project quotations. You just need your electrical bill. It is also a CRM that helps them organize their customers and their sales team.
Some achievements during my time at Sunwise were: Sunwise re-branding, Sunwise academy's youtube channel, Sunwise blog, developing new features for mobile and web apps, and Sunwise UI (Design system).
The challenge
When I joined the team as the lead product and visual designer, Sunwise had one year of running operations. They tried to sell a good product, but the brand's marketing strategies and identity needed to be revised. The current CEO wanted to populate the brand with graphics and personality.
My Role
My role in this project was to bring new ideas to the table. To help build the vision of Sunwise and to determine and set design parameters for the team to work on the same page. Throughout this process, I found some areas of improvement and opportunity that became evident over time.
The Approach
The most important thing was to establish brand guidelines. After a few weeks of using their software, I noticed some inconsistencies in components and interactions. They needed some Design System to ensure consistency across the platform and advertisement.
We audited the current apps (desktop, mobile, and tablet) in two weeks to identify which components were inconsistent. To unify the design, style, and content tone, we created Sunwise UI, the first step of a design system.
Together with the development team, we populated the Sunwise UI library with atoms, components, and molecules. Incorporating this library into our working method helped speed up the process of creating new features to unify the design, style, and content tone.
After creating the component library, we focused on refining and redesigning old screens within the app.
Sunwise is a very robust, large, and complex system. With Sunwise UI, developing new screens and maintaining visual consistency for mobile and desktop apps was easier. Here are some of my favorite screens I worked on from scratch.
The panel planting module integrated with google street allows you to place the panels on your client's roof. This function will enable you to make solar quotes closer to reality.
Sunwise Academy
After studying and determining the platform users' types, we found a necessity among solar installers for a reliable source of information about their craft. But I'm not talking about blogs; they wanted videos explaining how to do things. By this time, Sunwise had a good reputation in the industry. They were known for being a reference point for reliable information. So we decided to start a youtube channel.
During my time in Sunwise, I created commercials, short animations, webinars, interviews, short capsules of information, and tutorials on how to solve problems with the app.
The YouTube channel had a very favorable response from users. In the first two months, we reached 800 subscriptions.
Sunwise's Website Rebranding
When I enter the company, they only had a landing page to sell their platform. It was too static in my opinion and it didn't reflect the current level of expertise of the platform. After brainstorming ideas, and organizing objectives we created a whole new website in Webflow. I was in charge and upfront of this initiative.
The new website had an excellent response from users. After taking several surveys to validate interactions, we received many positive reactions to the new image. The contrast that the illustrations generate with topics as complicated as those of the solar industry helped users not to feel intimidated by the technicality.
With the new website, we also created a new blog. This initiative helped organically position the website at the top of the google search engine when people looked for information about solar topics in Latin America. I drew every single banner, and it was my favorite part.
Sunwise is a very young company. It is constantly evolving and growing. Throughout my time with the team, I have learned that the best way to scale software is with order and documentation. With these two tools, you can easily incorporate very brilliant minds into the conversation of improving the experience. It is so lovely to work when the whole team is on the same page; everything runs smoothly.
