Highlights: 70+ energy clients onboarded • Real-time monitoring across facilities • Custom plant configuration • Misconfigurations caught at setup • Component inventory management • Multi-role platform (4 user types)
Before → After: Sol-Ark's limited API data → Custom real-time monitoring • Pre-configured plants → Seven-step plant builder • Manual inventory → Component library with port validation • Generic dashboards → Role-specific insights
Thesis: Ukko turns scattered energy data into decisions—by matching electrical hierarchies with product hierarchies.
The Challenge
EWX Power had a critical issue. Clients ran EWX hardware through Sol-Ark's generic monitoring platform. They got some signals—but not the granular, component-level truth EWX hardware needed. Clients couldn’t configure bespoke plants, track inventory across sites, or tailor views by role.
Data Scarcity: Reliance on third-party APIs meant generic data formats that didn't map to EWX's specific components (inverters, batteries, solar arrays).
No Configuration: Clients couldn't build custom energy plants with specific components, sensors, and connections. Every deployment required manual workarounds.
Inventory Chaos: No system existed to track hardware (sometimes hundreds of components) across multiple facilities.
One-Size Dashboards: A C-suite executive monitoring 50 facilities needed different insights than a field technician troubleshooting one inverter.
EWX needed Ukko: real-time monitoring, custom plant configuration, component inventory, and role-specific insight—no workarounds. My mandate: design an intuitive yet powerful platform in four months.
Domain > Decor
You can't design what you don't understand.
I spent the first month refreshing my electrical engineering foundation—from AC/DC conversion to HVDC/LVDC coupling. I spoke to EWX's engineers, read technical documentation, and studied electrical diagrams. The design had to respect physics first.
The insight hit me early: This wasn't merely a software design problem. It was a translation problem—turning electrical engineering workflows into intuitive UI flows.
From Electrical Reality → Product Reality
Architectures before dashboards.
Ukko translates the physics of power into the logic of product. We mirrored electrical hierarchies (estate → facility → plant → component → series) inside the UI, so engineers navigate like they think and executives see the right roll-ups by default.
Sidebar Architecture
The structured sidebar became our information scaffold:
Main Section: Estate-level overview, drill-down to facilities, plants, and components.
Data Management: Tools for engineers to connect external data sources and map metrics.
Configuration: User roles, permissions, and dashboard customisation.
Navigation mirrors electrical mental models: start big, drill down, then configure data flows and permissions. Executives stay at estate health; technicians jump straight to components. PLANTS LIST.png110 KB
Turning weeks of manual setup into a guided workflow was key. The plant creation process involves selecting components, defining parameters, and ensuring electrical compatibility—complexity broken down into seven steps:
Steps 1–4: Quickly capture identity, operational status, capacity, and components.
PLANT STEPS.png287 KB
Step 5—Connections with Live Validation (the heartbeat): This critical step manages component interconnection. The interface utilises port-to-port mapping to block invalid pairs (e.g., HVDC-LVAC), flags voltage mismatches, and generates a power-flow diagram (PV-inverter-battery-load) to confirm energy paths at a glance. This is where weeks of guesswork become a guided, error-proof setup.
PLANT STEPS 2.png217 KB
Steps 6–7: Monitoring schedules and a final review to ship the plant confidently.
The progressive flow, coupled with real-time technical validation, ensured the platform was both usable by managers and respected by engineers.
Dashboards That Answer Questions
Validate at the edges (where failure is costly).
I designed role-specific dashboards that pulled from the same dataset but framed information according to the user's need. The design prioritised answering specific questions:
Executive Is the estate healthy and profitable right now? High-level KPIs (Total Production), Status Donuts (Fault/Warning/Normal), and System Health.
Plant Manager / Geo Where are my assets and what’s their live load? Geographic map with live load data ticker, facility-level performance trends, and alerts. PLANTS map.png479 KB Field Technician / Plant Detail How is this configured, and where is energy flowing? Component-level diagnostics, Power Flow Diagram, Sensor Readings, and Configuration tools.
Implementation and Collaboration
Progressive disclosure beats documentation.
I worked in continuous, tight collaboration with the EWX team and Mentorjam B.V team:
Weekly triage with engineers and EWX stakeholders prevented spec drift and ensured technical accuracy.
Co-design in Confluence with Julian Roux-Stevens (CPTO) codified constraints and turned them into software deliverables.
A Component Driven Figma Design system enabled parallel development without rework, keeping dev velocity high.
Impact
Ukko is deployed with over 70 clients for testing, providing immediate value by eliminating misconfigurations and improving operational visibility.
Misconfigurations: Caught at build time, significant reduction in field rework (observed in pilot deployments).
Setup time: Weeks of manual configuration to guided flow in hours.
Technician MTTR: Faster triage via component pages and power-flow diagrams. Improved issue detection speed.
Data Integrity: Custom monitoring delivered component-level data that external APIs could not.
Learnings
Domain > Decor: You must speak the user's technical language to earn their trust.
Architectures before dashboards: Solving the information hierarchy is the prerequisite for designing the right screens.
Validate at the edges: Error-proofing complex configuration flows (like Step 5) saves the most money and time downstream.
