Energy Conservation Design Challenge
By: William Dias Prada
Tags: Energy, Collaboration, UX Design, Environment, Ecology

Energy Conservation Design Challenge

Photo by Appolinary Kalashnikova on Unsplash.

Making good use of your time during a global pandemic can get stressful (read taxing).

Normally, a sunny summer day in Seattle, WA (or London, UK) would find us outside, with friends, enjoying the ever elusive bright star.

Recently, Nathalie Di Domenico and I were commiserating over our shared experience of job searching in a pandemic, and filling our time with useful projects. We came across Projectdesign.tips design challenge, and excitedly dove straight into a challenge that peaked both of our interests.

The challenge we chose, “Help people to save energy (heating, water, electricity) in their homes.”

Below, you will find a detailed design framework we journeyed through to come up with a solution to this challenge.

The website outlined an optional 7 day template designers could follow. We decided to use this framework lightly (alongside the framework Artiom Dashinsky outlines in his highly recommended book “ Solving Product Design Exercises”

We began our challenge by seeking to understand our goals (The why) for the challenge.

In order to better understand the problem space, we sought to understand our goals. After conducting a preliminary survey on people and their relationship to their energy usage we found the following:

The majority of users would like to reduce their energy consumption, yet do not know where to begin.

The majority of users would like a straightforward way to visualize their household’s energy consumption

Users were interested in learning more about how they could save energy

After analyzing the data, Nathalie and I talked about the importance of this challenge (not only at an individual level, but a collective level). By informing our users on their personal energy usage, we would empower them to make more conscientious energy decisions in the future. Our goal for the challenge is to reduce the cognitive load it takes to figure out how much energy consumers are using. We also want our solution to be educational and change the helpless attitude surrounding energy use. Our hope is that our user’s energy bill would no longer be an unwelcome surprise, but rather an expected amount.

After we had a better understanding of the Why, we moved on to the Who (Define the Audience).

Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash

We narrowed down our target audience to Millennials and Generation z’s. We felt targeting this audience would have the most impact on the environment as they are the upcoming generation. We also thought creating energy conscientious habits early on would be beneficial for establishing a culture and future rooted in eco-living.

When and Where (Understanding our user’s context and needs)

We decided to narrow our scope and target US, and UK energy markets

After identifying the domain, we researched and analysed varying competitors that were based in the American and British regions.

As a result of completing this table, we gained a better understanding of what type of product was lacking in the market. In terms of the user interface we saw Smappee as a good model to get inspired by, mainly because of its visual simplicity. However, in terms of functionality the Hive and Nest apps were providing their energy-addressed solutions similarly to how we instinctively envisioned our product doing. During the research that we carried out on several competitors, we found a lot of information regarding user feedback, technical issues and other relevant details. All this helped further elucidate to us the needs our users will have and the type of blockers we may confront.

Some noteworthy discoveries included:

Physical implementation of our imagined device is a complex matter requiring technical expertise

The app design must look to give users control & customizability as much as possible to give them the experience they desire

The app should have accessibility features that are applicable to people of all types and abilities

The app should consider types of users, for example, student vs students sharing a room

Our design should look to avoid the need for customers to contact 3rd party engineers through having a simple, effective and trustworthy system.

Seeing as our product will be primarily aimed at young students, gaining approval from universities and campus colleges will be a major challenge requiring thorough convincing.

What (the type of features we want our product to provide for users)

We continued to explore the realm of possibilities by ideating in the form of 6–8–5 sketches. Within this process we put very few limitations on ourselves, so as a result we came up with some creative solutions. Below is an example of just one of the many sketches we created:

After putting together our divergent thoughts and concepts, it was then time for us to start prioritising features and slowly converge towards a first viable iteration. After much discussion and editing we managed to create a hypothetical storyboard that we felt conveyed a very plausible user scenario.

The purpose of having a storyboard is to allow us to remember the mental journey which is happening at different stages in a university student’s life. As designers we constantly reference back to this scenario to ensure that the product which we are making directly correlates with what the user needs.

After now establishing a clearer goal for what the product will do, it was time we started creating some hypothetical screens. Using Figma we created some ideas of what the app could include.

These conceptual high-fidelity screens are designed to keep things straight-forward for our target users who are most likely new to managing their own energy bills. Because of this we have done the following:

Purposefully, we have chosen to omit any need for a bottom navigation. The idea for this is to lower the cognitive load for users and to ease them off having to learn a complicated design architecture.

We have included a tube which reads your current projection based on the energy you have used so far. Users will be able to quickly view whether their day, week, month or year is remaining under their pre-set budget which is set up when a user first registers their details. The user can navigate to settings to edit this or toggle/change other features.

The audio button allows users to ask for what they need, for example, “am I under my budget this month?”

Users can save money and manually manage their home devices (which in theory are all specially linked to the app) from their phone.

Things we would like to uncover through further inquisition:

How difficult would it be to install a device that is linked to the energy provider and is linked to all the devices built within an accommodation hall/building? How expensive would setting up something like this be?

Would it be more efficient to have a device for each room? What are the pros and cons of this?

Should this meter device be a visible, usable product or something that operates behind the scenes and purely accessible through the app?

What are the chances a university would adopt such a proposal?

Nathalie and I really enjoyed this design challenge, and are interested in researching energy conservation as well as how we can improve our own habits further moving forwards.