Beam
A solar energy management system that optimizes cost-effectiveness and facilities energy sharing. Received an Honourable Mention in UX Design (2025 Student RGD Awards).
Timeline
1 week
Team
Sam Overend, Jocelyn Zin
Skills
Product Design
Background
Solar energy is increasingly popular in home energy management systems because it harnesses renewable energy, saves on money electricity bills, and reduces one's carbon footprint.
As solar panels become cheaper and more efficient, we decided to explore how solar energy can be managed in smart homes in the future.
What are some current problems with residential solar energy?
Wasted Energy
Solar panels can generate excess electricity during summer, leading to a surplus of energy that often gets dumped.
Inconsistent Costs
With the rise of renewable energy sources, energy prices can vary greatly (even within a single day) due to dynamic tariffs.
challenge
Homeowners need clearer visibility into where their generated solar energy is going and smarter guidance on how to maximize the financial and environmental value of their solar panels.
Our challenge was to create a physical product and accompanying mobile app to address efficiency problems regarding the use of solar energy in residential systems.
competitive analysis
How can we improve on existing products?
We reviewed smart home products such as Ecobee, EcoFlow Smart Home Panel 2, and Google Nest to understand how they adapt to user routines and support automation. These provided a benchmark for the features our product should have.
While these products offered useful design patterns, none of them were specific to solar energy and hence could not address the issue of wasted surplus solar energy. This revealed a key opportunity for us.
Give users more autonomy over their excess solar energy through sharing and selling options.
goals
Through our benchmark analysis as well as current user problems specific to solar energy, we created a list of goals and features for our product.
Store generated energy in home battery if available.
Check real-time battery status and supply levels.
Facilitate energy sharing and selling.
Manage temperature automatically through occupancy detection.
Smart learning to adapt to user's routine.
Keep track of current energy costs and spending history.
Understanding our audience and visualizing our user.
Based on our research, we created a persona for our target audience, homeowners. This informed our user journey map which helped us visualize the end-to-end process of purchasing and using our product, Beam.
final design
Our final product, Beam, is a wall-mounted smart interface paired with a mobile app for monitoring and optimizing home solar energy consumption.
Daily Reports
Track home energy consumption with daily summaries based on user goals.
Control Over Excess Energy
Sell surplus energy to the grid for money, or share it with others.
Smart Suggestions
Beam automatically adapts to user routines for optimal energy usage and provides additional suggestions to save costs.
Real-Time Control
Easily turn devices or entire rooms on and off via the Beam app.
key Takeaways
Prioritizing impact over deliverables.
The short length of this project forced us to delegate research and design tasks efficiently to maximize our time. This meant making strategic sacrifices (such as moving directly from sketches to high-fidelity prototypes), allowing us to focus our energy on solving the core user problem rather than other deliverables.