June 2023
Watt by Watt:
designing an effective solar technology demonstrator.
During my time as a UX designer at Innovobot Labs, I was part of the multidisciplinary team that designed and built a tech demonstrator for Watt by Watt’s patended perovskite mini solar panels. This technology allows you to transform ambient light (even from artificial sources) into electrical energy.
The Watt by Watt teams needed an effective demonstrator that would allow them to take their samples to trade shows and speak to both technical experts about the solar panel performance, but also to less technical potential customers about use cases and business benefits of their technology. The demonstrator would be comprised of a physical demo device holding the perovskite samples that would communicate via Bluetooth to an Apple phone and display important solar panel information in a digestible format. This would enable the Watt by Watt sales team to talk through their product and its benefits to customers and investors.
Requirement mapping & early prototyping:
storyboarding and sketching to convey design direction.
The project timeline being quite short, our team needed to quickly understand the messaging the sales team wanted to deliver and convert that into a clear design direction. I spent a few hours talking with the Watt by Watt sales and engineering team asking questions to understand their main value proposition and market positioning.
Utilising this information, I created the storyboard and preliminary sketches above. These were approved by the customer and helped define the demo device vision for our engineering team.
Physical product design:
iterating via sketching, CAD and 3D printing.
To design the look and feel of solar pannel holder device, we started by showing the customer’s team some images of similarly sized devices such as cell phones, mobile battery packs and bluetooth speakers. Based on their feedback, I quickly sketched some design options which we reviewed as a team before deciding on the approximate design direction. We then utilisez Autodesk Inventor to design the components. We iterated on the design by 3D printing three different versions of the device, performing usability testing along the way.
iOS App Design:
a simple interface to tell a compelling story
For the demonstrator app design I elected to utilize plenty of whitespace and the blue and white colors from Watt by Watt’s brand guidelines create a look and feel that would convey robustness, safety and simplicity. I utilized yellow and green as highlight colors to draw attention to important elements. The demonstrator flow is comprised of three screen each of them exploring a different technical benefit and/or commercial application of Watt by Watt’s solar cell capabilities. The sales person could then select which screens to show prospective client or investor depending on the story they were trying to convey.
The final product was well received by the Watt by Watt team and they have since been using it at every tradeshow with great success.