How I designed a construction monitoring tool that saved our customers 18% on expenses and added an additional 3% of ARR to our revenue pipeline.
Raptor Maps is a solar software company that is building an integrated operating system, Raptor Solar, that supports solar site owners and managers, to manage their solar sites through drone-captured analytics and workforce management tools.
As part of Raptor Map’s efforts to be a resource for solar sites earlier in their lifecycle, it was discovered that there is high demand for analytics and operational toolings at the construction level.
Back in 2019, we did offer construction monitoring. However, using drone-captured analytics at that time was extremely time intensive and expensive, taking about 3-4 weeks to generate a report and cost user $4,000 per report, with a profit margin of about 6%. We shut the program down - it simply wasn't worth it.
However, with advancements in drone technology, solar sites now have the capability to station drones on-site, enabling remote operation. This eliminates the need for pilots to travel long distances, saving both time and resources. Additionally, our internal analytics tools have become faster and more intelligent, significantly reducing the turnaround time for users to receive their findings.
Before diving into ideation, I first needed to gain a deeper understanding of the problem we were solving and clearly define our core users. This would ensure that the solution not only met user needs but also aligned with our business objectives. After consulting with the Raptor Maps operations team, it became clear that our primary users were EPCs (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) and Site Owners—essentially, the team responsible for building the site and the stakeholders funding the project.
With our core users identified, I wanted to dive deeper into their pain points, understand what they needed to monitor, how frequently they wanted to report their findings, and identify opportunities where our software could streamline their workflows.
Partnering with my product manager, we conducted six discovery calls with past construction customers and current customers who fit the ‘Owner’ persona. These conversations provided valuable insights into their challenges and helped us uncover key areas where our tool could add meaningful value.
Owners have little to no solution for construction monitoring. The solutions they do have aren’t fully reliable, with a high chance of human error and lack of transparency.
In addition, owners lack the ability to obtain a comprehensive overview of construction monitoring data, hindering their understanding of the underlying reasons for specific construction statuses and the percentage of completion.
I also compiled a list of 10 construction elements that needed to be monitored. Users also emphasized the importance of comparing findings week over week. This shifted our focus from “What should we report on?” to “Can our current software capabilities support tracking these elements?”
For example, users wanted to monitor whether underground wiring had been initiated—but how could a drone detect something beneath the surface?
To address these challenges, I worked closely with the engineering lead to evaluate the feasibility of each request and determine what was achievable within our existing technology.
While the engineers assessed the technical feasibility, it was time to design how the data would visually appear in our software, Raptor Solar. For the other inspection types we offer, we overlay findings onto a user’s Digital Twin—a digital map of their solar site. Applying the same approach to construction data made the most sense for two key reasons:
1. Our data processing pipelines were already built to display captured analytics within the Digital Twin.
2. Our Go-To-Market team was positioning this feature as an additional data layer users could report on. This aligned with their existing mental model, making the Digital Twin the intuitive place to find this information with the Raptor Solar ecosystem.
I wanted to explore the user experience of overlaying the different data layers in the map as well as how the user would compare their reports (a user need previously stated). There were two comparison concepts I ideated on:
1. A 1:1 comparison where users would select the two inspections they wanted to compare. This is an element we currently offer in a different area of our app.
2. A timeline experience, where users could select an inspection by selecting a period of time. This would be a net new experience.
While the engineering team continued exploring technical feasibility, I coordinated with our customer success team to visit a solar construction site and shadow the project manager for a day. My goal was to gain firsthand insight into how our tool would integrate into his daily workflow while also gathering real-time feedback from him and his crew on the early low-fi designs. This would allowed me to refine and iterate on the solution based on their practical needs and expectations.
- The solution that resonated most with our users was the timeline comparison concept. They loved the ability to scrub through the timeline and visually track incremental progress.
- Users also expressed a strong need to generate and share these reports with site owners at the end of each week. Their ideal workflow involved flying the drone on Monday mornings and Friday evenings to capture a clear before-and-after view of their crew’s progress.
- Users highlighted the importance of incorporating weather data to provide better context for construction progress. Weather monitoring hadn’t been a focus in our initial discovery, but it quickly became clear that it would be a valuable addition to the tool.
- Project managers wanted compare their progress to projected milestones if order to see if they were behind or ahead of schedule.
- The site manager expressed interest in wanting to fly the drone and collect data twice a week, one time on Monday morning and one time on Friday, so that he could compare the progress through out the week.
In addition to supporting our users, It was extremely important to validate that our data models were set up to receive these new pieces of information we were attempting to surface to our users without adding extra complexity and cost to the business. We partnered with our operations and analytics team to workshop our existing data pipelines and anticipate where there might need to be back-end improvements in order to support the new data capturing workflows.
I met with our engineering leader and product manager to discuss the feasibility and impact of each piece of requested data. For the first iteration we decided that the most impactful layers, within the scope of time we had to build were the following:
Foundation: The piece of earth that is fully dug and prepped for solar equipment installation.
Racking: The racks that the solar panels sit on top of
Modules: The solar panels themselves
While the MVP release of this feature would only include three core elements, I wanted to incorporate future-state elements into the design as well. This would serve as a reference for the team when we had greater capacity to expand the functionality.These future elements included:
Weather Monitoring: Providing weather data to help users contextualize progress—or lack thereof—based on environmental conditions.
Project Milestones: Enabling users to gauge whether they were ahead or behind schedule, offering clearer progress tracking.
We met with the Operations and Go-To-Market team to review the designs and go over the results of the test flight.
⛔️ It was discovered that our drone was not capable of flying close enough to the site to capture the data we needed and also display the imagery in a way that it could be overlayed on top of the map ⛔️
We only had a few days to come up with a new solution, so the team decided that instead of users seeing the drone imagery on the Digital Twin, we would use satellite imagery to supplement.
The issue was, the satellite imagery would only be updated every three months. Users would still see the percent complete of the construction layers, they just wouldn’t see imagery that paired with these findings.
I strongly disagreed with this decision. Visually seeing the data in the Digital Twin was a fundamental part of the user experience, a key need expressed by our users, and a cornerstone of our business identity.
To address this, I worked with our lead engineer and product manager to devise a solution: making the imagery accessible geo-spatially through image pins (see screens to the left).
With this approach, users could click on the pins to view images taken at specific locations. The response from our users was overwhelmingly positive, as they appreciated having this new functionality at their fingertips.
When it comes to handoff - organization is everything! Here is a peak into how I like to organize my files.
With the advancement of our drone technology, users no longer needed to spend on hiring a drone pilot to travel to the site to fly it. The pilot could fly it from the comfort of his/her office. This ultimately saved our users 18% on financial resourcing.
With this new construction monitoring solution, Raptor Maps was able to save 43% of time on the data capturing and analyzing process compared to the the first time we offered this solution
Adding construction monitoring to our product suite contributed a 3% increase in ARR, directly strengthening our revenue pipeline. This additional funding played a key role in propelling Raptor Maps from Series B to Series C.
Click HERE to learn more about Construction Monitoring!
