Solar® SaaS Designing for clarity under pressure.

An industrial energy software company needed a UI/UX designer to reimagine their solar plant monitoring platform. The challenge: design two complex data screens — an operations dashboard and an energy forecast model — that plant operators could read and act on in seconds, not minutes.

This wasn't a consumer app. The users are on-site operators managing live solar infrastructure — 12 zones, dozens of inverter strings, and real-time production data flowing every minute. A missed anomaly costs revenue. An inverter underperforming at 74% for six hours is a maintenance issue, not a blip. The interface isn't just showing data — it's the tool through which operators make high-stakes decisions under time pressure.

No reference screens were provided. No existing design system to follow. Complete creative freedom — with the constraint that the result had to feel enterprise-grade, trustworthy, and scannable by someone who's checking it every few minutes between site walks.

The operations dashboard needed to answer three questions simultaneously: What are we producing right now? Where are the problems? What does the system alerts panel say? These aren't three separate panels — they're three layers of the same answer, designed to be read in one scan.

The design is organised into four zones, each serving a distinct cognitive purpose. The KPI strip at the top gives you today's headline numbers at a glance. The Production Analysis chart (with actual vs expected lines) gives you the trend. The Solar Plant Monitoring section with 12 zone cards gives you spatial, per-zone health. The System Alerts panel gives you prioritised action. No hunting — each zone answers its own question.

The Forecasting screen is a separate view in PIEX — accessible from the sidebar under "Forecasting," directly below the Dashboard. Where the dashboard is reactive ("what's happening right now"), Forecasting is proactive: "what will the plant produce tomorrow, and how confident is the model?" Operator Emre Kaya can switch between these two views instantly from the sidebar without losing context.

The screen answers three questions in one glance: the predicted daily output (47.14 MWh), the irradiation conditions driving that number (max 775 W/m²), and the model's confidence in its own prediction (88% forecast reliability). The fourth KPI — 24.8°C average temperature — sits alongside, because temperature directly affects panel efficiency. These aren't decorative metrics. Each one is a signal the operator acts on.

The brief asked for responsive mobile screens — not scaled-down desktop layouts, but genuinely intentional mobile experiences. An operator checking the dashboard on their phone while walking the site near Section B2 has completely different needs from one watching a monitor in the control room.

On mobile, the hierarchy tightens. The four KPIs (7.54 MW current power, 61.60 MWh daily production, ₺75,802 revenue, 10,986 kg CO₂) compress into a 2×2 grid at the top — the most critical numbers, immediately visible. The production trend appears as a compact sparkline card below, with the amber anomaly dot visible even at small size. Revenue and CO₂ follow. A persistent bottom navigation bar (Dashboard / Forecast / Alerts / Settings) keeps all core sections one tap away, never buried in a hamburger menu.