By Schneider Electric
Getting a decarbonization roadmap used to mean hiring a consultant and waiting weeks for a document that went stale the moment a site changed. We turned it into a wizard: a company answers questions about its sites and energy systems, and the product returns a dated roadmap with projects, costs, savings and a projection of its own emissions to 2030.
The user is not a large enterprise. Activate reaches small and medium companies through Schneider's channel partners — IT resellers who sell it alongside their own offer. The person on the other side has a target and no in-house decarbonization expertise. Before the product, they exported utility invoices as PDFs, organised them in Excel and paid a third party to process the data.
This did not start from a hunch. It started from an engagement problem written against two dated product slides: generally not engaged with platform, missing value prop. People were using Activate to report emissions and doing nothing with the result. They knew their footprint. What they did not know was what to do first.
The decision: design the roadmap as a calculated output, not a curated list. Every screen in the Plan module renders something the system computes from the wizard answers — which projects apply, at what cost, with what payback, and what the emissions curve looks like if you do them. I designed the UI from what the calculation could produce, and the questions from what the calculation needed.
The calculation needs per-site, per-system answers, and nobody fills a 30-question survey for eight sites in one sitting. So the incomplete state became a designed state, not an error. The roadmap renders anyway, with a banner, and gets better as you feed it — instead of refusing to exist until the form is done.
A timeline with a chart, editable tables and per-row state cannot be judged in a static frame. So I built a working roadmap and deployed it, and that prototype became the testing instrument — every research guide points at it. We ran numbered experiments on a written pipeline: research guide, prototype, tests, analysis, insight report, user stories, sprints.
Navigation held. People read left to right, hit the business-as-usual number without friction, and recognised the design consistency with other platforms — free validation of Zeus. What broke was the reading of the data. The chart was not self-explanatory: people hovered over lines to guess units. Nobody could tell whether *gap to target* meant time or emissions. One tester could not find the microgrid project and added it as a custom project instead.
So the work moved from adding features to making the calculation legible: explicit axis labels and units, tooltips per KPI, an unambiguous definition of gap to target, visual separation of categories from projects. And an earlier round of client sessions had already pushed the biggest change of all — the roadmap stopped being a document and became a tracker, with a status on every project at every site.
The Renewables page is where Activate hands a company over to the next product. Green tariffs, PPAs, onsite solar and Energy Attribute Certificates — which is what Zeigo Power exists to trade. Same suite, two ends of one journey.
What I'd do differently: build the roadmap as an editable object from day one. Everything the redesign added — removing projects, comparing impact, tracking progress — is agency we retrofitted onto something that started read-only. The client sessions told us that in the first year; the architecture took until the second to allow it.
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Exelobaiza | Design Engineer