Carbon Measurement
Carbon Direct's measurement tool quantifies emissions from different sources, track changes over time, and provide insights into potential areas for improvement. The two main sources of data used to calculate an organization’s footprint are operational spending and activity data.
ROLE:
Lead Product Designer
TEAM:
Product Manager, Engineering Manager, Developers, Finance
Problem
While it’s critical to get access to operating expenses data, this is a challenge because our customers tasked with the carbon footprinting work are generally not within the finance function and might rely on their finance team for getting the required data. The requirements for that data almost always get messy - either the data structure or the format or terminology isn’t clear. Also, exporting this kind of data is an infrequent exercise for finance teams and they don’t know this all the time. This leads to a lot of back-n-forth between the teams and re-work.
How can we guide the customers on What data to get and Where/How to get it
Understanding the customer journey
Over three sessions with our PM, customer delivery, and carbon accounting team specialists, I consolidated our current understanding of the customer experience and identified the pain points and opportunities
Design Iteration
PHASE 1 - Updating content and upload experience
Based on feedback from our finance team, we had improved guidance for exporting the expenses data from their accounting systems.
The previous experience had a modal with a click to upload. I updated this to a full page with a drop zone upload to allow the customer to review the file afterwards.
PHASE 2 - Pre-formatting the data
Our carbon accounting team had been manually cleaning and formatting the uploaded data, so we explored how to alleviate that step by auto-detecting data fields and doing some data mapping, and allowing the customer to review their data and edit the formatting themselves.
OUTCOMES & LEARNINGS
This improvement to the upload process was scaled across the other activity data categories such as utilities, which most customers had readily available. Phase 1 and 2 were recently released.
These were the metrics we were hoping to track after the release to gauge feature success:
Number of customers who share the correct Spend data with us without manual guidance from us
Time spent by users in the Spend data upload feature before their first attempt
Number of Spend data uploads done before the correct data was uploaded by the customer
Number of questions we get from customers on the topic of collecting and sharing Spend data