Team 4 - Kill the Site Survey (Amy, Alex, Bronwen, Colin, Natalie, Sean)
Site surveys cost the solar industry $200 million every year. As they work to become profitable, solar companies need to reduce costs by eliminating steps in their process, like the site survey - in this case, by having the consultant help while on-site after a successful sale.
Our app walks a solar consultant through a site survey in a way that's simple and easy for them to cover the major 3 parts of the survey: 1) Determining any trees or building that will cast shade onto the roof 2) Outlining the current electrical service and any information needed to properly interact with the utility 3) Characterizing the current roof type and obstructions
The system could then push data and images into any company's CRM, letting solar design teams quickly use the information to create a full planset and move the solar project on its way.
We quickly prototyped the experience in InVision, then walked through it with industry professionals for content and completely new users to ensure they could use it without training. Then we built it using javascript on react.
Pulling a photo into a front-end application took more time than we thought, but we figured out how to do it. We also found there were a lot of potential edge cases for site surveys - no satellite imagery, homes where we couldn't get clear photos, and roofs of multiple levels - where we might be able to make the site survey faster but not eliminate it entirely.
We got a fully online demo available that we could actually have users walk through themselves. We also managed to create a very intuitive user interface that taught people as they went - something that could even let us expand our user base from just sales reps to homeowners, further reducing costs as sales could be done online.
- HTML
- CSS (SCSS)
- JavaScript (React)