Internship

Renewables for Retail

An interactive dashboard to determine which bp gas stations can be turned into small-scale wind farms.

Developer tooling

Developer tooling

Timeline

3 months

Jun-Aug 2024

Company

Shipt

Role

Product Designer

Team

Walt, Product Manager

Katie, Data Analyst (user)

Timeline

3 months

Jun-Aug 2024

Company

Shipt

Role

Product Designer

Team

Walt, Product Manager

Katie, Data Analyst (user)

Problem

40k retail sites. How many are viable for small-scale wind farming?

bp has tens of thousands of retail sites and wanted to harness the power of wind. Small-scale wind turbines, a promising source of energy, can help the company achieve its goal of net-zero emissions and promote sustainability. But where is the best place to start piloting these turbines?

Design Question

How might we decide which gas stations to turn into wind farms?

How might we decide which gas stations to turn into wind farms?

Solution

A digital tool that displays viability metrics and other strategic data

user stories

3 unique user needs.

💰

Decision Maker

‍"I want to know the ROIs for each site so that I can know which sites will be the most viable financially."

⚙️

Wind Engineer

‍"I want to know the weather conditions each site so that I can know which sites will have the best for generating wind power."

📊

Strategic Planner

‍"I want to know the lot size and see what the landscape is near the site so that I can determine the ease of building a turbine at the site."

wireframes

Getting our ideas on paper

The key features we wanted to include that would align with users' needs:Search functionA map with all retail site locationsViability metricThese features would give the user an easy way to make sense of the data.

prototype 1

Building our React prototype.

Our first prototype was a full-stack application. I developed the front-end using bp's own component library to maintain brand consistency.

Some key features:

  • Search bar

  • Table

  • ROI viability metric

Having a table with all the retail sites displayed with the viability metric would be sufficient for the MVP. It's a straightforward view of the data.

Caption

Caption

Prototype 2

Prototyping in PowerBI

Due to time constraints and after receiving management feedback, we decided to pivot to creating our application in PowerBI.

Summary page

Goal

Inform users of the most important information for decision making.

Solution

Highlight the number of the sites that have “green” viability and the countries with the highest number of viable sites.

Summary page

Goal

Inform users of the most important information for decision making.

Solution

Highlight the number of the sites that have “green” viability and the countries with the highest number of viable sites.

Caption

Map view

Goal

Have a visual representation of retail sites.

Solution

Show the locations of each retail site as well as metrics like ROI and yearly power generation (kWh).

Map view

Goal

Have a visual representation of retail sites.

Solution

Show the locations of each retail site as well as metrics like ROI and yearly power generation (kWh).

Caption

Table view

Goal

Users may want to explore data more in depth.

Solution

Provide a table view to view the raw numbers for each site.

Table view

Goal

Users may want to explore data more in depth.

Solution

Provide a table view to view the raw numbers for each site.

Caption

Reflection

Learning by doing.

Challenges

  • My lack of technical skills. I had never used React or worked with engineers before. However, my team was supportive and helped me pick up React quickly.

  • Difficulty identifying our users. Since we were designing an internal tool, I wasn’t sure who to engage with which made it difficult to envision the user journey. Next time, I would try to spend more time conducting user research to gain a clearer idea of our project requirements.


Successes

  • Had fun learning with my teammates and working on a real-world problem, especially focused on sustainability.

  • Leveraged different skills like research, front-end development, working on a diverse team, and the user-centered design process to create a useful solution addressing a business problem.