ESG & Carbon Accounting Platform

Greenview Portal is a B2B SaaS platform designed for ESG sustainability reporting and analytics.

The problem: The platform had performance issues, with features taking months to build and often rolled back due to errors and poor usability. It was difficult to use and didn’t meet business needs.

The solve: We rebuilt Greenview Portal with a focus on user-friendly design and performance, aiming to create a scalable platform for sustainability tasks.

My role: I was the sole product designer in a remote team with a product manager and engineers.

A dashboard with environmental metrics related to energy, emissions, water, and waste.

Research

The scope was pretty ambiguous at first, so we ran over 30 user interviews and focus groups to really understand why the platform wasn’t working for them. We found these key problem areas:

Three major pain points: single-property focus, usability challenge, and navigation confusion.

To outline features clearly, we created personas and mapped several user journeys for major tasks to understand the needs our product had to meet.

Three personas, each with a job summary, motivations, frustrations, key needs, and tools & softwares.

Design

Every feature I design starts with a lot of paper sketching. During this phase, I also work on defining the information architecture and controlled vocabulary to keep the platform consistent.

Random paper sketches laid out on a wooden floor.

Each feature goes through multiple design reviews. I like to bring software developers in early so they can weigh in on any development constraints. Once the scope narrows, I create detailed design specifications that capture our discussions and key design decisions.

Screenshot of a Figma page which includes some sections of design specifications.

Feature Highlights

Due to sensitive intellectual property, only certain features and screens can be shown. In total, we developed 12 modules over 9 months. Here are a few feature highlights.

Our app features a dashboard homepage that helps users track live ESG data, crucial for sustainability meetings and keeping numbers on track. It provides a quick overview, allowing users to monitor progress without digging into detailed reports.

This feature lets users benchmark their sustainability practices against industry standards, drawing from Greenview’s expertise. It serves as a self-assessment tool for hotels, allowing them to evaluate their alignment with typical industry practices.

A screenshot of Greenview Portal's Best Practices section. Users can benchmark sustainability practices by answering questions across 8 clickable categories, with Social Impact selected. Each category has a progress bar showing answered questions. Below, a larger progress bar reflects overall progress. One question asks if the property has statements to prevent discrimination, with yes/no options and an option to comment. Tags include Human Rights and Modern Slavery, GSTC, Policy, and Reporting.

This section collects environmental data, which powers other parts of the portal, especially for generating reports. The data input process includes collaboration to ensure accuracy, and by this stage, the data has already been cleaned and normalised for use.

A screenshot of Greenview Portal's table of environmental data.

Impact

Our upgrades to the infrastructure and user flows provide a strong foundation, with the full impact of these improvements continuing to unfold over time.