We have started to prototype the different applications requested by HEEP. These applications include graphs representing changes in oil price, cooling degree days, and a report card for the organization's performance. Consumer's will be able to use these applications to educate themselves about different energy factors. Also, HEEP will be able to provide the public a simple, visual way to see their performance.
Our initial design of the system was more complicated than required. We weren't thinking about long-term maintainability. After discussing our design with Professor Johnson, he suggested to simplify the design as much as possible and increase the complexity only as necessary. This was a great suggestion. It actually made everyone's life easier. We changed our design so it uses Google spreadsheets to hold the data and creates the visualizations based on queries to the spreadsheets. HEEP will be able to update data by just editing a Google spreadsheet which means that training to use the system will be minimal. Also, after we are gone, the applications can be maintained without many complications.
We had some difficulty creating the applications at first because we didn't receive the required data from HEEP. We decided to procede with the construction of the applications based on best guesses of what the data will look like. It is important that the project keep moving forward even though we may need to redo much of the work. It will be a repetitive process of reviews and revisions to the applications before we are able to get it right.
Our first challenge in getting these applications working was learning the Google Visualizations API. Fortunately, Google provides a lot of documentation and code examples which made learning how to use the visualizations fairly simple. We were able to construct prototypes for the applications without many problems. Previews of our prototype applications can be found here.
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