Phoenix Hydrogen

Web app (phnx.co) and website design for a clean energy startup. Phoenix Hydrogen is the first marketplace to distribute Green Hydrogen at scale. I joined the team to help with building the product and go from 0-1.

  • Product Director

  • Project Manager

  • 2 Software Engineers

  • Eda as Product Design Lead

Team

Deliverables

  • User flows

  • High Fidelity Mockups for Hub Admins and Members

  • Prototypes for various user flows

  • Design system V01

  • Concept Mocks for funding pitches and grants

  • Infographics

Challenge

The ‘Empty Room’ Problem

The biggest challenge for any marketplace startup is to bring the first customers to the platform. At the end of the day, nobody wants to hang out at an empty restaurant or bar until some more customers come in! It was even harder for Phnx.co because it’s trying to be the first marketplace in a highly regulative and private industry.

Deliver value during the first interaction

Solution

✨ Directory of Green Energy Activities

We created a public map feature that allows all users to browse the list of publicly listed activities to learn more about the companies that are participating in green job creation, green energy generation, and grid-scale storage. The goal of this feature is to help promote a green hydrogen transition, demonstrate market development, and engage potential buyers and sellers. In order to participate in the trade, you must have a profile for your activity so that there is transparency and trust.

Solution

Provide confidentiality

✨ Private Activity Settings

Added privacy option for hubs to share activities exclusively with members, ensuring they remain hidden from public view. This addresses a common concern among energy companies seeking to maintain confidentiality.

The greatest barrier to the acceleration of hydrogen markets is a physical trading location.

Challenge

A physical trading location achieves the volume of scale and participation required to set a market price for hydrogen. If PHNX wants to be a marketplace it also had to serve as a local warehouse like Amazon where they can store hydrogen and trade.

Focus on the scarce side of the market

Solution

✨ Become the Trusted Storage

The founders soon realized that in order to make the marketplace viable they needed to focus on the storage unit which is the asset that all the players in the ecosystem need. So they shifted the focus to their salt cavern storage assets in Vegas. I created this infographic for the DOE grant application.

Results

We invited 40 hub participants to sign up to the platform, update their activity cards and browse the map for other activities.

7 participants signed up and agreed on doing in-depth user interview.

7 participants were able to sign up to the platform with no friction and able to check and update their activity detail card.

Sign up and edit activities

Based on these interviews the founders of Phoenix Hydrogen realized that there is a lack of price transparency in the market due to its immaturity and privacy. They also faced challenges in aligning timelines, H2 formats, and locations to trade. As a result, they shifted their focus to building storage assets instead of developing the marketplace product. Although it was a tough lesson, the founding team was grateful for learning early on with our MVP and being able to secure funding to address the larger issue and the missing link in the ecosystem and eventually establish a marketplace in the future.

Business Model Pivot

Design system v01

As our team focused on building the MVP and adding more features to the product before launch, I realized that not having a single source of truth was becoming a problem at that stage. I was also the only designer on a part-time contract and had very limited work hours. I had to balance creating the design system and making mockups for the development team based on the roadmap. Each day, I spent a few hours figuring out the most commonly used design elements and making them consistent with our brand. In just a month, we had our first design system. This improved productivity, made our elements consistent, and reduced the number of decisions I had to make quickly.

Design System Demo

  • Various Components

  • Various Components

  • Icons

  • Styles