Sunwarden
Energy
Kilowatt-hours, visualised as something you can tend.
Sunwarden members own slices of community solar installations. We built the member dashboard where kilowatt-hours feel less like accounting, more like a garden you're tending.
The old statements PDF was generated quarterly and showed only dollar amounts. Members felt no connection to the installations they co-owned. Membership renewal was trending down.
We designed a calendar-first dashboard where each day is a leaf, coloured by production. A credit ledger shows the money trail with no finance-app anxiety. Neighbour comparison is anonymous and opt-in. Live data via Convex reactive queries.
Renewal rate climbed from 71% to 94% in the first year. Average session time 4m 12s (previously: members rarely logged in). Two co-ops copied the pattern under an open-source license.
Same system. Every surface.
Four seasons, in order.
Interviews with 18 members. Discovered most wanted a garden metaphor, not an investment metaphor.
Three visual metaphors tested: garden, weather, ledger. Garden won. Weather became the secondary.
Convex reactive queries pipe live solar data at under 1s latency. D3 custom renderer for the year calendar.
Rolled out to three co-ops. Open-sourced the design kit under a permissive license.
Moments that earn a pause.
One system, three frames.
"Members tell me they now check their dashboard before checking the weather. That sentence means more than any KPI."