Demand for energy efficient heating and cooling systems in residential homes have been steadily increasing in the US, not only for the energy bill savings from switching to heat pumps, but also because tailored central air systems allow for greater physical comfort all year round.

The Conduit App allows HVAC contractors to quickly analyze unique home configurations, so that they can propose comfortable, efficient, and sustainable heating and cooling to every homeowner.

However, as we onboard more Comfort Advisors from a diverse background to our app, we observed more challenges that prevent HVAC contractors from scaling their sales practice.

However, as we onboard more Comfort Advisors from a diverse background to our app, we observed more challenges that prevent HVAC contractors from scaling their sales practice.

Each single family home in has their unique configurations that impact the heating and cooling load of their HVAC design, and there’s no “formula” to derive a reliable load calculation simply based on square footage of the home.

Some of those unique factors include the “design conditions” - climate factors of the home such as elevation, temperature, humidity, wind and orientation; the construction materials throughout the home and their respective insulation levels; and the number of occupants and their lifestyle in the home.

Selling HVAC jobs on the spot - which are big renovation investments that often cost 20,000 ~ 30,000 USD - is also a highly stressful and competitive process.

On one hand, there is very limited information about the prospective customer’s home prior to each sales appointment, with requires the Comfort Advisors of HVAC contractors to quickly obtain as much information about the home during their time-boxed onsite visits.

on the other hand, Comfort Advisors need to clearly explain their proposal and defend their quote to win over homeowners from other HVAC contractors (who may try to sell a cheaply-priced job based on inaccurate load calculations).

Last but not the least, Comfort Advisors often come from diverse, non-HVAC related backgrounds, and have very limited knowledge of building science.

Many Comfort Advisors don’t have technical training or experience in HVAC. It’s hard for them to get an accurate and comprehensive proposal in a short amount of time to win over the homeowner. For Conduit, this feeling of uncertainty and lacking of confidence using the software correctly leads to less activation rate and subscription renewals.

We started by auditing the current workflows in the Conduit App to identify what distracts users from feeling confident about navigating the app and achieving high-accuracy load calculations. Order of operation in the app make it easy to overlook settings, technical terminology doesn’t instantly click with users.

We brought engineering team onboard to discuss technical opportunities and constraints on how we can proactively identify and surface unusual user inputs that have a high chance of reducing load calculation accuracy.

After a week of back and forth team discussion that seems to run in circles, I realized that many terminologies and concepts that the ideation centered around were indeed vaguely defined, and not necessarily depicted from the end user’s perspective.

Therefore, I took a step back from ideating new features, to refining the definition of the original problem. I noticed that there’s are two different interpretations of “confidence” when doing load calculation, and looking through the lens of end users refreshed our interpretation of what features and data are useful.

I started the design process by auditing the current workflows in the Conduit App, and exploring different ways to surface load calculation, recommendations & warnings into users’ workflow intuitively.

After bring the R&D team onboard with the design concept of a centralized UI panel, I needed to determine what and how the Conduit App communicate “progress” and “accuracy” to the user.

1) Shift from the “progress bar” bar concept, to the concept of 4 distinct states in the UI to make the communication more straightforward and actionable.

2) Bring forward important data from the reports section to the home page

3) For the presentation of recommendations, explore the tone of communication and how user digests information

The final design is a highly compact and efficient load summary panel at the top of each project's home page ("Job Home"). It give users the most essential insights into their job status and load calculation values, will providing easy access to view and act on recommendations that will further improve their load calculation accuracy.

1) Replacing the old header with the new load recommendations section

2) Design for the different states of the load summary UI panel

3) Consolidating the details of load recommendations from both user flow and technical perspectives