Auditing and Redesigning the Grid Connection Application Portal

The project ran as a Foundation phase built around four client workshops paired with four design sprints, not a single linear pass through research and design. Each workshop surfaced a slice of the current problems, jargon nobody outside the business understood, statuses that didn't match what BPM actually tracked, forms that dumped every field on the client regardless of their case, and immediately confronted it against business priorities in the room, instead of writing it up for a meeting two weeks later.

Between workshops, the corresponding design sprint took the friction points from the room and turned them into work: a full audit of the existing portal, case type by case type, then benchmarking against competitors both in energy and outside it, to see how other industries solved the same progressive-disclosure problem. Findings from each sprint fed directly into the next workshop, so the client was reacting to something concrete every time, not to an abstract plan.

Synthesizing four workshops' worth of notes fast enough to keep that rhythm going was its own challenge, and this is where I leaned on Claude to help structure raw workshop output into patterns I could act on between sessions, instead of losing days to manual note-sorting. Based on the accumulated audit and client feedback, the target flow came together last: a single six-step path covering all eight case types, with the homepage and the application finally reading as one journey instead of two.