I had a summer internship at Otovo during the summer of 2021. Otovo is a company that sells solar panel systems in Europe and Brazil. I was a part of a team of summer interns where I had the role as a designer. All the other summer interns on the team were developers.
We were given a project where we were going to develop a system for monitoring solar panels to make sure they are working as expected and alerting the users if something is wrong. I began my process by doing some secondary research and conducting user interviews. I also talked with a lot of the employees at Otovo to get a better understanding of the issue we were trying to solve.
While we were working with this project we also redesigned the app to clean it up and make space for implementing the new system. All of the graphical design was done by me, using Otovo’s design system, Rainbow. I am happy with the result and the redesign was published the fall of 2021.
A particular challenge that I had to solve during this project was to find out how to communicate to the user if we detect an issue in their PV system. Unfortunately we were not able to monitor the PV systems in real time and would need several days to detect if the issue was resolved. Finding the balance of providing enough information without overwhelming the users was a fun and difficult challenge. The goal was to keep the users calm and informed so they would not have to call the support team in distress. By achieving this we could relieve the support team of a lot of work while also increasing the customer satisfaction.
