HEEP Week 5: Further Improvements

This week we prototyped a new application as well as made refinements to our existing applications. We now have several solid ideas for applications that we feel HEEP will like. Our initial designs were good for providing basic ideas, however, we still have many improvements to make before they are ready for distribution.

Our new application will display the amount of negawatt hours per year that are generated by HEEP rebates. A negawatt is a measure of energy that did not need to be generated due to increased energy efficiency. This is a good metric to provide to users, so they are able to see what kind of impact HEEP is having on Hawaii's power generation and energy efficiency. The information will be displayed as a numerical value as well as a pie chart showing the breakdown of each appliance's contribution. Consumers are able to use the numerical value to determine the performance of HEEP. Shown below is a mock-up of the negawatt display.



We have been working on improving the report card application. Initially, we were unsure how to evaluate HEEP's performance. We wanted to use some aspect of HEEP to assign a grade, but could not think of a meaningful metric to use. We have edited the design of the report card, so HEEP's grade is based on the amount of negawatt hours they generate through rebates. We will assign thresholds for each grade and assign HEEP a grade based on them. We feel that this is a meaningful way to grade HEEP because rebates seems to be their main connection to the public.

The calculators we designed will be revised to be more user-friendly. Initially, we assumed that users could enter a lot of data into fields of the application without many issues. However, we received suggestions that we should hide some of the fields by setting default values to them and read information from spreadsheets where possible. The less information that users need to enter the better.

I feel our weekly meetings have been very useful. During the meetings, we are able to get different point of views about our applications. This provides a good sanity check to make sure that our applications will work as intended. Everyone has their own opinions about what the best way to do things. By incorporating the best of everyone's ideas into a product, we are able to improve and refine it. Everyone has different opinions about what is the best way to accomplish a task. Hearing alternatives is a good way to improve an application because others come up with ideas that you may not think of on your own. I hope that we will continue to improve our applications in the coming weeks and have them ready for HEEP to perform an initial review.