Launching the Rayo MVP Website
The MVP journey of a venture that makes solar energy accessible to homeowners in Switzerland and empowers home energy management.
Branding, User Testing, Prototyping, User Interviews, Website Design, App Design, Customer Journey, Customer Feedback
Since joining Sparrow, a venture-building company for Migros, I have worked on shipping new ventures to customers and validating business models.
I am a member of the founding team of Rayo, a subscription model that makes solar energy accessible to homeowners in Switzerland. Over the past year, I helped validate our business model with customers to move us from our initial prototyping phase to MVP and reach our Series A in June 2023.
As the Product Designer, I was responsible for all the customer-facing touchpoints spanning digital and offline materials across a 20-year customer journey in an agile environment, including the Rayo website for lead generation, the My Rayo app for monitoring and optimising energy, and all marketing and educational materials for our customers. Setting up this new venture demanded establishing new processes that we constantly sought to improve through testing and feedback.
Designing for an extended customer journey
The ideal customer journey is 20 years, from first interest to the end of their rental period. We segmented this process into smaller sections to work on.
Main phases of a customer’s journey with Rayo
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Pre-signature (2 months)
This includes all activities from becoming a lead, participating in the sales process, and signing the 20-year contract.
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Post-signature (6 months)
The time between signing the contract and installing the solar solution, where we educated the customer and managed administrative tasks.
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Installation (+- 1 week)
The week that installation takes place requires coordinating with external partners and customers.
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Post-installation (20 years)
Maintaining a 20-year relationship with the customer, including support and maintenance of the solar installation.
Simplified user journey
To be able to move fast and get to market quickly, I simplified the user’s journey on the website to a few steps with one key goal: Request a quote.
The site map with all the different pages and templates.
Prioritising features for the MVP website
After having a clear journey, we conducted a user story mapping exercise to define the content and features needed for our MVP launch. This brainstorming exercise also gave us many features and content that could be used in later releases, which we put in the backlog.
User story mapping
Main features and content for website
Minimal Viable Product for Launch
MVP Marketing Website
The marketing website is the primary way for users to learn about our product/services.
MVP Configurator
To engage our service, the user needs to complete a configurator and answer questions about themselves, their home and energy consumption.
From a multi-page website to a single landing page for launch
The feature mapping exercise produced many possible pages with content. I challenged myself to strip it down to the basics a user would need to know to understand and engage with Rayo, resulting in a single landing page.
Main challenges for the MVP website
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Challenge 1
We need to build trust with customers to sign a 20-year contract with a brand new startup.
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Challenge 2
We couldn’t display specific hardware since they differ depending on the installation partner.
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Challenge 3
Tied with the trust factor, we could not display our relationship with Migros since we needed to prove Rayo as a valuable service on its own.
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Challenge 4
We could not display prices, since it varied from house to house, depending on factors of roof size, slope, cantonal subsidies and local partner prices.
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Challenge 5
The ‘Swiss factor’: the imagery and language on the website had to feel Swiss and local for people to believe it’s existence.
Creating the configurator
A configurator is a multi-page form on the website that users must complete to become eligible leads (engage our services and receive a quote). We ask as few questions as possible to shorten the journey while getting the necessary information about our customers’ homes and energy usage to create an accurate first quote.
Feedback and iteration
Through weekly reviews of Google Analytics, HotJar recordings and user feedback, we were able to iterate continuously to improve the customer’s experience in the upper funnel (Pre-signature journey).
This ultimately led to the design of Website 2.0 following our successful Series A funding in June 2023! 🎉
Visit Rayo
Feel free to visit the Rayo website and the My Rayo app.