Refactoring Designs

Since the last post, we have refactored our designs to better communicate with our target audience. This is more of a marketing stage in our design. We still have not yet reached the implementation phase but we hope that changes in the next week.

This is what we have for our Negawatts Generated by Rebates application now:

This is a visualization of the percentage of total rebates that were generated by certain appliances. HEEP provides rebates for certain appliances and shows consumers how much energy they did not use because of their rebates.

We decided to get rid of the Appliances Energy Savings calculator because it did not relate to HEEP at all. It also is available on other websites like EnergyStar.

We constructed a Top EnergyStar Appliance Calculator that displays the potential loss caused by NOT purchasing an EnergyStar appliance. Studies show that people are more inclined to pay attention to things that cost them money, then things that save them money.


This is our Projected Energy Generation Visualization. It shows the past and projected means of generating energy up to 2030.

This visualization shows our past and present oil consumption and a bubble that appears when you mouse over a data point for the given year.

The next few weeks we are going to produce the final prototypes of our models, a fully working example that we hope will meet the needs of HEEP and their visitors.

On a side note, I really enjoy using CampFireNow.com and BaseCampHQ.com to manage our project and communicate. Campfirenow is a great web chat based collaboration tool that lets you share files and display them in the chat area while retaining the format and markup of pasted code. It also logs your chats so if a member of the group comes late he or she can catch up, search and see what happened earlier. Basecamphq.com is an amazing project management tool that lets you do everything Google code does, but a lot more. Both are written in ROR (Ruby on Rails) and I really enjoy the way it all works. You'll have to see for yourself to know what I mean.

Stay tuned for our next update...

HEEP Design Revisions

Realizing that our last designs were a bit too complicated for the average user, we decided to play them down a bit and make a few of them simpler to use and more visually appearing. I'm learning that high level design is much more challenging then the actual implementation. As such, I think this is a really good, but difficult exercise. I am starting to see the benefits after much frustration.

Let me walk you through a few of our mock-ups:

This is the EnergyStar Refrigerator Calculator. You select an approximate date and size and it will calculate your savings based on predefined average energy usage by the appliances. The energy cost, which will fluctuate the most will be either scraped from an external source, or updated manually on a Google Spreadsheet.

This is the Oil Consumption Timeline. Looking at it will hopefully tell you what is happening. It calculates the change from last year in the amount of oil consumed (number of barrels).

This is the Energy Generation by Source Chart. It breaks down the recent and future use of certain methods of power generation.

We also have the idea of working with NegaWatts (from Wiki):

Negawatt power is the idea of creating incentives to reduce demand for electricity to ease the load at peak times or alleviate the need to build more generation plants. In theory, these negawatts can be aggregated and an arbitrage market could be created to trade these.
The term was coined by Amory Lovins, who saw a typo — "negawatt" instead of "megawatt" — in a Colorado Public Utilities Commission report. He adopted the term to describe electricity that wasn't created due to energy efficiency.[1]

The Negawatts is almost complete, but the visualization needs a bit more work. Basically it comes down to totaling up the Negawatts for the appliances.

As we get closer to picking a few top selections of these visualizations and calculators, we will start to really refine them and take feedback from different people to see what needs more work.

HEEP Update - Milestone 1

Today is the first milestone of our HEEP project. I think significant progress has been made as far as creative thinking and design has been concerned. It's like a paradigm shift from constructing from specifications to designing a project for the client. They have basically handed us the reigns to pursue what we think is best. I hope it ends that way as well.

Our plan is now to come up with as many ideas as we can think of, outside the box. We are no longer focusing solely on visualizations. We want to create applications that reflect what the user of the site would want, not necessarily what the organization would like for itself. For example, a report card for the organization is not really at the best interests of the organization, rather, a report card for products that it gives rebates on would be a wiser choice since the consumer will find that information much more useful.

Currently we have thought of a few calculators that will serve as applications in the tabs. These are being implemented in plain javascript with the use of google visualization api to fetch data from the spreadsheets into our function that does the calculations. The result is displayed for the user in an easy to interpret interface.

The Appliance Report Card

• Get top 5 Energy Star Efficient Models
• Get Cheapest Non-Energy Star Models
• All models must have similar specs
• Compare/Determine How Long Until Break Even
• Less Amount of Time is Better
• Grade Based on Time for Break Even

The Appliance Calculator

• User enters info in for 2 models
• Calculate Break Even Point
• Total Savings and amount of time (lifetime estimate)

The Cooling Degree Day Calculator

• User enters two years, their corresponding
  power usages, and a base temperature
  
• Calculates total change in power usage per cooling degree day and percent of change

The Cooling Degree vs Oahu Generation

• Power generation for two years are read
• Cooling Degree Data is read for corresponding years
• Calculates the amount of power generated per Cooling Degree Day and percent change

We expect to have 2 of these calculators available for demo in two days.

We also plan on giving HEEP a live demonstration so they can give feed back in 2 weeks.

HEEP Status Update

We have implemented a raw form of the requested Google Chart visualizations embedded in JQuery Tabs. The problem with this is that the data is displayed in a form that is not quite readable or understandable by the user. Our next step is to take the Cooling Degree Day chart and the HEEP Report card and figure out a way to make them more usable. Brainstorming ways to achieve this over the next day hopefully will give us a good result.

Our current idea for the the Cooling Degree Day data is to display a settings tab, as part of the chart, that will allow the user to input his usage values to obtain a chart that provides a useful user-centric visualization of the request.

As far as the HEEP Report Card, currently we are going to design simply that, a report card. Letters /[A-F]/ will be distributed over months to indicate HEEP's success. In order to calculate this data is a different story, it is something that we need to work with HEEP on and discuss in detail. For now we'll focus on creating creative solutions.

By Thursday we hope to have, at the least, a mockup design of the charts we will be designing.