Sparkfund | Software Platform

The Problem

The energy technology ecosystem is scattered. If a company wants to purchase electric vehicle charging stations, the company needs to navigate a complex web of different parties including, lenders, the company’s utility provider, Charging station vendors, installers, and other seemingly extraneous players.

The Goal

SparkOS, Sparkfund’s technology platform, aims to simplify this process, bringing this ecosystem together into a simple and accessible web interface. 

Part 1 - initial ideation:  journey mapping

Sparkfund is not inherently a software company. However, there was a clear need for a digital tool to bridge the gap between all of our disparate services. Journey mapping helped us understand the steps, and the pain points along each step. 

Part 2 - wireframing (then pitching it)

Once the full picture was laid out through journey mapping. The next course of action was to wireframe out the journey at a high level so that we could visualize and understand it.

Part 3 - prioritization of features

Once the first version of the wireframes were completed and accepted, the product manager, sr developer, engineering director, and I worked to prioritize the features according to the company’s roadmap and goals.

Part 4 - first steps of design: login experience, then customer qualification.

Once we had a sense of a roadmap, we jumped into design, first creating the login page experience, including designing the password reset flow and determining user permissions.

Part 5 - the product development cycle begins (and continues)

• Discover, Design, Listen >> Repeat 

• This process has been the driving force behind the design process for SparkOS. To this day, we follow the essence of this process with a lot of improvements and upgrades.