Svea Solar
More than a pocketful of sunshine
The opportunity
A broken experience that was undermining the brand
The challenge
Svea Solar’s app had become an experience weak point. Customer & employee trust was eroding, installers were actively recommending competitors apps for monitoring their solar energy production. The product no longer reflected the brand, service and investment it was meant to represent.
The opportunity
Svea's customers are Powershifters, people actively participating in an energy transition, not just observing their own roof. We wanted to create a new app experience that delivered their basic functional needs, but also built a platform for new brand and product experiences.
Realise the vision, build the foundation.
The northstar vision came out of the pitch — two Creative Directors had set the ambition. My job was to make it real.
Working directly with the CDs, a UX designer, and Svea's CPO and PO, I was in the room daily through the concept phase — sketching, ideating, and finding the feel of the product. Motion and animation became my primary tool: how the app moved, responded, and rewarded was how we tested whether the Powershifter energy was actually present, not just described.
Once the concept was established, I led all visual design and delivery — translating a brand built for physical and campaign contexts into a scalable digital product system. Svea's brand language was confident and expressive in ways that don't map neatly onto an app interface. A significant part of the work was helping their team understand how to flex and extend it, building a foundation that would carry forward to other applications and platforms.
year
2023
timeframe
9 months
role
Lead Visual Designer
tools
Figma, After Effects
category
UI/UX
The work
Data that earns attention
The visual challenge throughout was making energy data feel engaging rather than technical. Finding ways to show information that rewards the user for opening the app, not just informs them. The orb, the motion language, and the data visualisations all serve the same purpose: turning numbers into something you want to come back to.
Key decisions
Decision 1
The application jewel
The CPO came to us with a specific request: the app needed a central visual element that embodied the Powershifter identity — something iconic, not decorative. Designing the orb became one of the most intensive parts of the project. Dozens of iterations, each tested against whether it felt alive, optimistic, and unmistakably Svea. It was the moment where the brand stopped being a set of guidelines and started being a felt experience. Getting it right was the thing that unlocked confidence in everything else.
Decision 2
Building for scale, not the screen in front of us
Svea's existing brand guidelines were built for print and campaign. Applying them to a native app with dozens of states, data densities, and interaction patterns required rebuilding the logic from the ground up. Rather than adapting for the MVP alone, we established a digital brand system extensible enough to carry Svea's identity across future products, websites, and platforms — giving their internal team a foundation to build from independently, without losing coherence.
The impact
The rebuilt app gave Svea's internal team a foundation they've continued to build on. New features have shipped in line with the backlog we defined, and the design system and brand language have carried forward without drifting, expanding it to scale their digital experiences.
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