A design build of the Project Dashboard — placeholder data and the five-phase tracker visible.
NVEnergy — New Construction Portal
Untangled Nevada Energy's dense, multi-step service setup into a guided experience — for contractors, homeowners, and staff alike.
Overview
The problem
Setting up new electrical and gas service for a construction site through Nevada Energy meant office visits, outdated PDF forms, faxing or hand-delivering paperwork, and follow-up phone calls to check status. Different construction types followed different procedures, and none of it was easy to navigate. The job was to turn that into something a homeowner or contractor could actually follow.
Role & duration
Lead UX designer — I worked directly with NVE leadership to map the process, built the hi-fidelity Figma screens and InVision prototypes across eight personas, ran user testing, and partnered with the EY team on the React.js web app and React Native iOS/Android build — feeding testing feedback back into the designs as it developed.
Two-year engagement, 2019 — 2021
The team
Direction came from one-on-one work with Gary Smith, an NVEnergy executive who carried the pulse of every process in the operation. Having a domain expert engaged as the source of truth is rare — and Gary was a genuine pleasure to work with, which is a big part of why the design could move with confidence.
Constraints
The old process was a maze
Different construction types followed different procedures, and status lived across phone calls, faxes, emails, texts, a myriad of forms, and sneakernet. No two homeowners or contractors were following the same path.
Designing for eight audiences at once
The portal had to serve large and small contractors, homeowners, and government entities — eight distinct personas, each arriving with different needs, vocabulary, and levels of familiarity with the process. A contractor managing a dozen projects and a homeowner doing this once needed the same system to feel built for them. Much of the design work was reconciling those audiences into one interface that didn't force anyone to learn someone else's workflow.
Internal and external audiences, one app
The harder constraint wasn't technical: modernizing the customer-facing experience meant reconfiguring Nevada Energy's internal processes to match. The design had to satisfy the people using it inside the utility as much as the customers outside it.
Process
Building the wizard through the maze
We built a wizard-based initiation flow that walks users through service setup, backed by seven dashboards that show where a project stands at every phase — scheduling, tracking, and next actions all in one place.
To hold together across 300+ screens and 1,200+ variants, over two years full-time, I built a library on Material-UI components — a shared visual system so every dashboard, form, and flow felt like one product rather than a dozen disconnected tools.
Outcome
The portal replaces office visits, fax forms, and status calls with a single guided experience. It reconciled a genuinely complex, multi-audience process into something people can navigate on their own. And it's still in production at Nevada Energy today, actively maintained years after launch.
