LISE PILOT | UX
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AI Renewable Energy Prospecting

Designed the experience strategy for Discover, an AI-assisted geospatial platform that transformed how renewable energy developers identified and evaluated potential project sites. By unifying GIS data, environmental constraints, land ownership, and permitting insights into a single experience, I helped teams make faster, more informed development decisions while establishing the foundation for AI-assisted site evaluation.

My Role

Experience StrategyUX ResearchGeospatial UXCross-Functional LeadershipEnterprise Design

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Explore the advanced parameter GIS search experience designed to help renewable energy teams evaluate sites faster with interactive map-based filtering.

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Challenge

Every renewable energy project begins by identifying land with the highest probability of success. Developers relied on disconnected GIS tools, environmental datasets, permitting records, and land ownership information to evaluate potential sites. This fragmented process slowed decision-making, increased research effort, and made it difficult to identify high-quality development opportunities.

Solution

Designed Discover as a unified geospatial experience that brought mapping, environmental constraints, land ownership, permitting, and project evaluation into a single workflow. The platform helped developers identify higher-quality opportunities faster, reduce early-stage project risk, and establish the foundation for future AI-assisted search and decision support.

Design Process

  1. 1

    Discovery

    Partnered with renewable energy developers and business stakeholders to understand how project sites were identified, evaluated, and prioritized.

  2. 2

    Customer Research

    Interviewed developers, GIS specialists, environmental experts, and engineers to uncover decision-making workflows, pain points, and collaboration needs.

  3. 3

    Experience Strategy

    Defined a scalable experience strategy that unified geospatial intelligence, project evaluation, and cross-functional collaboration.

  4. 4

    Rapid Prototyping

    Created interactive prototypes to validate workflows and accelerate alignment before implementation.

  5. 5

    Validation & Iteration

    Refined workflows through customer feedback, improving usability, consistency, and confidence in project evaluation.

Highlights

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Research Participant Profile

Interviewed seven early-stage renewable energy developers across multiple regions, technologies, and experience levels to ensure research findings reflected diverse prospecting workflows, priorities, and customer needs.

Customer Journey Mapping

Synthesized interviews with renewable energy developers into an end-to-end journey map, documenting workflow stages, decision points, pain points, tools, and customer needs to identify opportunities for a unified prospecting experience.

Workflow Analysis & Opportunity Mapping

Documented workflows and identified friction points, blockers, observations, and design opportunities that guided experience strategy and product priorities.

Interaction Design Specifications

Created detailed interaction specifications documenting user flows, navigation behaviors, screen states, and UI interactions to ensure consistent implementation across the product.

Conversational AI Prospecting Concept

Explored a natural-language search concept that lets early-stage developers describe what they are looking for in plain language — transmission proximity and capacity, environmental constraints, landowner and parcel requirements, zoning, and other siting factors — and returns ranked, explainable site options instead of requiring manual filtering across disconnected GIS tools.

Key Results

Reduced Early-Stage Development Risk

Helped developers identify fatal flaws earlier, reducing time and resources spent evaluating low-probability project opportunities.

Accelerated Site Screening

Unified fragmented evaluation workflows into a single experience that improved research efficiency and project assessment.

Improved Capital Allocation

Enabled development teams to focus engineering and environmental resources on higher-probability project opportunities.

Higher-Quality Development Pipeline

Improved developer confidence by supporting more informed site selection and investment decisions.