Taigo Energy website

Company website for solar energy company Taigo Energy
Client
Taigo Energy
Timeline
June-August 2020
My Role
UX Design
Tools
Sketch, Marvel

Project Overview

I served as the sole UX Designer and collaborated with Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Support teams.
Due to NDA's, names have been changed

Taigo Energy is a successful established international company based in northern California which provides products, technologies, software and services to installers, distributors, and Original Equipment Manufacturers within the photovoltaic industry. Although the company does provide products for homeowners, their main focus is large businesses, OEM's, and companies who install solar equipment known as PV installers.

They have a company website which provides company information, and directs visitors to order Tigo products from distributors in their area.
Until now they did not utilize the site for sales lead generation.
‍
Some light box images may not display properly in Safari. Webflow is working on this but for the best experience, please use Chrome.‍

My task was to improve site navigation, refresh UI, and build a sales funnel for lead generation
Project Index
Research
Understanding the users
Reworking key task flows
New site
Measuring success

Research

Taigo Energy is a company located upstream in the Module Level Power Electronics industry (MLPE). They typically sell to distributors, OEM's, and PV installers. In the case of homeowners, products can be purchased from a local distributor.  Tigo has some competitors in this space, mainly Solar Edge and Enphase. I also measured the analytics on the Taigo website for the past year.

  • Competitors feature separate sections for 3 types of customers: Residential, Business, and PV installer. Tigo does not do this.
  • Competitors have clear CTA's on most pages that will lead to a contact form
  • 78% of visitors are using desktop PC's. 83% of visits are on weekdays. 80% between 8am to 6pm working hours in their local time zones. This could imply visitors are businesses.
  • Taigo's "Where to buy" page has a 63% exit rate. Home page has a 35% bounce rate

Initial testing

5 second test

Users were shown the old landing page for 5 seconds, then asked questions about what information they retained.

  • No users could identify the industry
  • No users could identify the company value proposition
  • Only 25% users could recall the company name
Read full details
Usability testing

Users were asked to navigate the old site and perform key tasks. Heatmaps and click tracking were recorded

  • No users could identify the industry
  • Over 60% of users had trouble logging in
  • 0 users successfully inquired about purchasing products
Read full details

Understanding the users

Who visits this site?

The Taigo website is visited by 3 main types of users. Residential owners, Business owners, and PV installers. Depending on the size of their project, Taigo may sell to them directly or direct them to purchase from distributors.

Understanding business needs

The Taigo sales team prefers large business and PV installers over residential owners in order to sell in large volumes. They currently get nearly all of their sales leads through presentations and seminars which introduce Taigo products. These are usually done in person. They do not have any way of tracking leads on the current site. They were worried that a sales funnel may lead to an overwhelming number of inquiries.
‍
Some quotes from interviews with Sales:

There's always a lot of questions about where to buy. A lot of people are asking about distributors and who's distributing in the US. - Taigo sales rep
The questions I see a lot are the premium version of the SMAR site, how to sign up for it, how to log into it. Many people have a hard time finding that information. - Taigo sales rep

Reworking key task flows

How to buy a product on the old site

With the old site implementation, the user had 3 ways to buy a product:

All 3 of these options have their own issues

  • The "Call now" button only works on Chrome and IE. Only works during business hours.
  • It's impossible to know which distributor carries which products, and if they have specific products in stock.
  • It's difficult to track user behavior once they leave the Taigo site and go to the distributor site
  • No sales lead tracking is done for users who contact Taigo through any of these methods
  • No information is collected from the user before they contact Taigo, leading to lots of emails or calls back and forth with sales

How to buy

Users were asked to choose from a very long list of distributors and then contact them directly.
How to buy a product on the new site

I proposed a new task which directors users to a contact form. The form collects key information which is parsed into Salesforce for lead tracking. After contacting Taigo, Sales can direct the customer to the correct distributor in their area the first time who has the items they want in stock. Salesforce integration will help categorize and prioritize leads which will reduce workload for the sales staff who currently do not utilize any such organizational methods.

New contact form

I worked closely with marketing and sales to create this multi-step contact form. I chose a multi-step form to reduce cognitive load and reduce form abandonment rate. A single step version was also created for A/B testing.

Clicking on various CTA's on the new site leads to this contact form

New site

All pages were redesigned in collaboration with Sales and Marketing. Pages were created for specific verticals. Some images here are placeholders which will be replaced when the site is implemented.

User testing with new site

5 second test

Users were shown the new landing page for 5 seconds, then asked questions about what information they retained.

  • All users could identify the industry
  • 80% could identify the company value proposition
  • 70% of users could recall the company name
Read full details
Usability testing

Users were asked to navigate the new site and perform key tasks. Heatmaps and click tracking were recorded

  • 90% of users could identify the industry
  • 100% of users could log into the SMAR site
  • All users successfully inquired about purchasing products
Read full details

Measuring Success

The site is currently in negotiations with outside development teams and is expected to be implemented in late Q4 2020

Although the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic may affect metrics in the short term, I will continue to monitor the results and will update this page.

Reflections

I don't approach a project thinking I already know the solution or even that I know the problem.

When approaching projects like this it's important to go in fresh to correctly identify the problem to implement an effective solution. I don't approach a project thinking I already know the solution or even that I know the problem. Conventional E-commerce B2C patterns would not have been appropriate for a company like Taigo which does not typically sell directly to end customers. I utilized my UX knowledge and soft skills heavily in this project to liaison with various departments and improve the website.

Back to top
Joel Lipton 2020