Building Clarasight

The journey of a carbon management and planning platform from inception

Climate tech startup Clarasight set out to simplify the unwieldy process of enterprise carbon planning. What is the best way to help the corporations of the world manage their impact on a warming planet?

Recognition: ODF Top Companies 2024, On Deck; 2024 Sustainability Movers & Shakers, The Business Travel Magazine

Company:
Clarasight (formerly Climate Club)

Role:
Design lead (research, UX, UI)

Team:
Collaboration with product, engineering, sales, and customer success

YEAR:
2022-2024

The Challenge

Sustainability is becoming an increasingly hot issue for many companies worldwide. Whether the impetus is competitive, cost-saving, moral, or regulatory, companies need to reduce their carbon emissions. Often, however, they don't know how. Some ubiquitous pain points of the carbon reduction journey are:

Decentralized, untrustworthy data
Executive buy-in
Lack of visibility into progress
Difficulty of measuring the impact of behavior change
Limitations of existing planning tools (e.g. spreadsheets)
Employee adoption

How do we help companies identify their unique emissions drivers and build an executable, trackable plan to address them?

Research

Research Goals

1

What prevents companies from moving from carbon measurement to reduction?

2

How are companies managing and planning their carbon emissions today?

3

Who is responsible for overseeing and implementing carbon planning?

4

How does carbon emissions reduction tie into business value?

Methodology

Subject Matter Expert Interviews

The product and design team conducted extensive discovery interviews with sustainability leaders at major companies in a variety of industries.

Discovery & Feedback Sessions

Advanced prototypes were tested on both early-adopting customers and other potential users. Live feedback heavily informed subsequent iterations of the platform.

Competitive Analysis

While carbon planning would have been a new concept, planning applications exist in a wide variety of sectors. Extensive research was done to identify commonalities in experience.

Sales-Led Discovery

Each iteration was fleshed out into a new, functional prototype. Prototypes were cycled through sales calls, until we determined which concept resonated most strongly with the market.

UX Design Process

User Journey

We fleshed out a complex user journey framework via live workshops and flow charts.

Storyboarding

We tested the user journey on a more developed storyboard, incorporating multiple user personas.

Wireframing

Several interfaces were mocked up and tested internally.

Focus Area

Though we demonstrated prototypes in a number of emissions categories, we made the decision to focus on refining highly impactful business travel.

Solution

Top Capabilities

Data management: Clarasight centralizes and cleans the disparate data needed to power emissions calculations.
Analytics: Clarasight automatically delivers historical and predictive analytics, surfaces actionable insights, and uncovers recommendations unique to each customer.
Forecasting and scenario modeling: Clarasight's calculation engine provides a picture of future emissions based on business growth assumptions, clearly showing an org's progress toward its goals, and quantifying the impact of reduction activities.
Distributed goals: Ensure employee compliance by distributing and tracking emissions goals to any desired segment, then track goals up and down the organization.
AI enhancements: AI-boosted insights and modeling capabilities expedite the onerous and time-consuming planning process.

Key Outcomes

Trust: Clean, up-to-date data supports quicker decision making with increased confidence.
Visible, trackable progress: Clarasight provides a clear, visual answer to the question, "How am I doing?"
Tell me what to do: Clarasight's recommendations surface customer-specific, impactful reduction opportunities, significantly reducing the cognitive load of carbon planning.
Increased efficiency: Modeling in Clarasight is exponentially faster than modeling in spreadsheets, and significantly reduces the risks posed by decentralized file management and human error.
Enabling buy-in: Clarasight's reporting is not limited to carbon; emissions impact can be tracked against finances and other key business metrics. When stakeholders can see the business value of a carbon plan, approval comes easier.