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...