Researched, designed, and launched the MVP of a B2B SaaS product from 0 to 1 that enabled corporates to manage their environmental impact and meet ESG goals.
Drove Lean UX to break into a new market, gained early adopters and brought over 1 million revenue.
Launched in Feb 2023
Oct. 2022 - Jan. 2022
CPO & Product Manager (2)
CTO & Software Developers (5)
Sales Lead (1)
UX Designer (2)
UX Designer
Contribute to the complete product lifecycle of launching the MVP from research to release.
25% - Problem & Scope Framing, Strategy Design, Information Architecture
30% - Dashboards & Data Viz, Foundation of Design System
50% - User Research, User Testing, Mock-ups, Visual Guidance
100% - Navigation, 2 user flows
During heavy rainfall, water from rooftops and impervious surfaces quickly accumulates and flows into storm drains, ultimately being discharged into local rivers along with trash and pollutants.
The concept of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) is crucial in the United States as it measures a company's commitment to sustainable development and greatly affects financing, recruitment, and reputation. We set our target users as sustainability teams in real estate companies to improve their ESG performance in stormwater.
This issue can be mitigated with Best Management Practices. For example, Bioswales is a practice of creating green spaces that capture and utilize excess rainwater, reducing stormwater runoff and pollution and create a more sustainable community.
o better understand the direction and feasibility of the project, We dive deep into this emerging market to seek product market fit opportunities. We conducted user research, including expert interviews and in-depth user interviews to understand our users in a new market, competive analysis and workshops to explore opportunities and narrow down the focus.
Based on ongoing user research, we mapped out the stakeholders in this new B2B market.
Our target user groups are sustainability team and Leadership. They are commited to address stormwater sustainability issues and achieving company's ESG goals.
We intend to offer a SaaS software to replace the position occupied by ESG/stormwater consultancy in our summarized stakeholder map.
While leadership executives may have a sustainability vision, the challenge lies in implementing concrete strategies, and data-driven progress measurements. Our product aims to address these needs and facilitate sustainability efforts related to stormwater management.
Armed with insights from ongoing user research, I held workshops to brainstorm various ideas and eventually narrowed it down to three steps in the roadmap.
The Resiliency Planner was chosen as the first feature to help users understand their status quo and generate optimized drafts to initiate plans.
1. We provide a dashboard to measure a company's current assets' impact and progress related to stormwater management.
2. We use our predictive model to create preliminary plans that identifies the best opportunities for maximizing impact. The company can then review, edit, approve, and then execute the plans.
The MVP not only bridges the gap between vision and action but is also scalable and maximizes the capabilities of our predictive model. We also explored other features, including "Portfolio Management," which focuses on integrating our solution with existing software platforms used by real estate companies, and "Project Delivery," which addresses various aspects of project implementation, such as construction, planning, and maintenance.
Our MVP was desinged for the process of initiating sustainability plans. We guide users through five steps to initiate plans. First, we help them understand their overall stormwater impact, then set up models to create plans automatically with properties with best opportunities. After that, they can review, edit, the plan and properties envolved, and send to approval.
First, I facilitated workshops to organize the Information Architecture with the team together. And I solved this challenge in these 3 pages in the user flow.
I grouped the MVP into 3 levels: Program, Plan, and Property. Corresponding to these 3 levels, we created dashboards help users break down large goals into smaller, trackable improvements for each seleted properties.
Through ongoing user research and user testing, we identified key metrics that help users make informed decisions and provides those data on dashboards at all levels. They are 1. Stormwater Better Management, 2. Cost Estimation & Recovery, 3. ESG Impact & ROI. I iterated the layout to ensure that data flows seamlessly from program to property.
Previous expert reviews underestimated the user flow for the Created Plan. This is because the participants were "Sarah", leadership, and buyers who are concerned with deliverables, rather than "Kelly", the Sustainability Manager who creates the plan. We soon encountered this challenge during later user testing with Sustainability Managers.
To solve the first user problem, I streamlined the Create Plan flow into 5 pages rather than a pop-up model. I incorporated a progress bar for better navigation and provided immediate feedback via a preview card. As for the domain knowledge, I added detailed instructions and tooltips with our PM.
Setting Environmental and Community Objectives
There's a key process to set objectives of the plan. Users need to allocate 100% of the weight to four objectives to change how the model ranks the properties, and thus change the outcomes.
To find the best solution for this rare challenge in setting objectives' weights, I went back to ideation stage to explore various interation patterns for our users.
After user testing with 5 participants, the Concept 2 was the optimal solution. It is intuitive and doesn't compromise the transparency of the underlying algorithm. To enhance the user experience, we incorporated the intuitive sider interaction featured in concept 1.
Based on user feedback, I also created Auto Adjustment. It help users automatically scale the weight setting when users proceed to the next step without achieving a combined weight of 100%.
We successfully entered the B2B market by launching our MVP in February 2023 and acquiring two early customers with minimal customizations.
- Evaluate and iterate based on user feedback and data
- Integrate map into analysis and visualization
- Research and develop personas of the real estate team
- Design and launch portfolio management module
