EagleView Powered Models is a new in-app integration for the Aurora platform that allows Aurora customers to request and purchase a highly accurate site model created by EagleView and their proprietary stereoscopic 3d model creation technique. This product makes it faster and cheaper for Aurora customers to get to install by speeding up and lowering costs for site surveys and simplifying the 3d site model amendments.
Aurora Solar Site Survey Partner Integration
Company:
Aurora Solar
Timespan:
Jan - August 2024
Role:
led product design as part of a cross-functional product team
How might we use EagleView’s modeling technology to make it faster and cheaper for Aurora’s customers to take a sold project and get it ready for install?
Problem:
Product demo:
Solution:
A sell-through model service integrated into Aurora’s platform combining the accuracy of EagleView site models and Aurora’s simulation and data authoring platform capabilities. Customers can purchase EagleView models and have them automatically delivered to their existing projects within the Aurora platform.
Aurora customers currently spend upwards of $200 to conduct a site survey before finalizing a solar panel design and creating install drawings for installation. While costly, this process reduces significant installation risks down the line for customers so they deem it necessary. By simplifying the roof measurement and model correction part of the process, we can save customers cost a money by eliminating this physical, technical task.
Journey mapping to frame product affordances to existing customer needs
I led a workshop with engineers, SMEs, and my team’s product manager to evaluate the feasibility of different features and proposed solutions. We had business pressure to ship this partnership asap, so understanding what features were most feasible and delivered valuable was essential.
Evaluating solution features by technical feasibility for a first release
I designed multiple prototypes to test feature sets so that we could limit scope and ship what customers would find most valuable first. Below is a feature that automatically combined existing solar panel designs with an EagleView model, but would include extra engineering work to automate. This would save customers time when importing an EagleView model to an existing project, but ultimately was shipped as a fast follow to the first release as we predicted it was not valuable enough to block initial customer adoption.
Value-testing customer needs
One significant challenge was coordinating with Aurora and EagleView’s customer support process to handle any support cases where customers were not happy with the model provided by the service. I worked with customer support stakeholders to create an iterative plan given the variety of edge cases. These edge cases were reflected as multiple error states within the UI to provide information to the user about the system state.
Planning for customer service support UX
EagleView Powered Models was first released as a pilot with 5 key customers in August 2024, then released in a general release the following month. Using product-led growth UI, customers have continued to adopt the product into their workflows with sales offering proof-of-concept trials to interested customers. Additional features like permissions were added iteratively following discovery in the pilot.