Sunpik is a one-stop-consultant for getting solar power. They remotely analyze properties, create custom solar-power system designs, as well as provide consumers with the best options for installes.
Sunpik came to our team to seek help in designing an effective desktop landing page and to optimize said landing page through AB testing efforts.
In order to design an effective landing page, we would need to dive deep into the consumers' mindset to figure out what their ultimate needs and wants were. The messaging on our landing page would position Sunpik in such a light as to relieve the consumer's pain-points and satisfy their needs.
We first dove into an USMO exercise. USMO is short for "User, Situation, Motivation, and Outcome" – it helped us better understand the situation that brings the user to the landing page as well as the underlying mindset and motive of the user when they arrive on the page.
Through USMO, we were able to arrive at some critical insights around our potential site visitors:
Through interview with industry professionals and online research, we learned that typical solar users were 50 to 60 year-old homeowners.
Adhering to this target demographic, we selected six home-owners who were interested in solar as well as six who have already made the switch.
Some of the questions we asked current solar-users:
Some of the questions we asked users interested in solar:
We filtered through the immense amount of information and jotted down pain-points, values, and insights. This was a hefty process as some interviews were an hour long!
We used affinity maps to organize the pain-points and values into categories to see what was brought up most. We ranked these categories of values and pain-points by how important they were to the users. The top 4 pain-points/ values to users:
With the needs and wants of our users established, we chose to define our target audience by creating two personas. We realized we created successful personas when we looked back at the interviewees and almost all of them fit into one of the two personas.
The personas defined who we were going to design the landing page to appeal to.
Before diving into designing the components of the landing page, we analyzed other companies', including competitiors', landing pages to see what the typical components were.
We brainstormed what would be nice to have on the landing page but not essential; these included video testimonials, interactive explanations, etc. We recommended these to the client for future exploration.
Sunpik did not have any branding guidelines. Thus, we utilized feedback from the Sunpik team as well as information collected from our user research to establish some general design principles and a very basic style-guide:
Check out my live prototype!
For each section of the landing page, we drafted layout and copy on pieces of paper. We taped these on the wall vertically to represent the landing page in physical form.
We experimented with layout and iterations of text and imagery and tested users for feedback.
We put together two hi-fi prototypes with similar design but different copy, which we used to perform AB-validation testing with 4 users per design to see which communicated Sunpik's value-prop and process more effectively. We reiterated based on insights from testing.
Please see some key design decisions and findings detailed below:
Initially, we had 'Get Design' as the CTA – through testing, we discovered users had no clue what a design would include
Users disliked forms that looked too rigid and "salesy"
Users understood the claims made in the header but did not understand how Sunpik would provide those values
We discovered in our user interviews that many current solar users read from brochures and online resources before taking further steps
An ongoing challenge was differentiating Sunpik from installers, and this was one of the main objectives of the client
A challenge we faced was balancing what Sunpik wanted to get across to the user and what could actually be effectively communicated
Due to the demographic targeted by Sunpik's growth campaign, most users who reach our landing page are familiar with the benefits of solar
In addition to creating the long-form landing page, we also created a short-form and other assets for Sunpik to AB test with.
Stay tuned for results of AB testing!
Looking back at this project........