Ground-up redesign of a powerful real-time energy monitoring and engagement tool for university campuses
The Pulse Occupant Engagement Dashboard (OED) was originally created as one of many sustainability initiatives for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
The dashboards, located at various Olympic venues, displayed real-time energy use and provided insights into consumption patterns.
The dashboards drew the attention of energy managers and, following the Olympics, many dashboards were deployed in commercial buildings throughout North America. They were also popular among educational institutions, and were installed on dozens of university campuses, including McGill and UC Berkeley.
Several key areas of the existing dashboard were identified as priorities for the rebuild:
The redesigned OED aimed to:
On-site visits to multiple universities allowed a multi-disciplinary team to talk with energy managers, facilities managers, sustainability champions, professors, and student representatives about how the OED could be best used.
These in-person visits were of tremendous value and would be instrumental in informing how we framed our view of the dashboard and its potential uses on multiple fronts.
These workshops, along with feedback gathered from dozens of other customers and users, also laid the foundation for ongoing collaborative relationships that helped us stay on the tracks as we moved forward.
Based on learnings from feedback sessions and on-site workshops with our users, we created a series of Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) to represent the users' mental model of the objects at play.
Recognizing that our underlying data architecture did not always map directly to users' conceptions was critical in building the core objects that undergirded OED's full feature set.
As the new dashboard was essentially a CMS, layouts needed to accommodate virtually infinite layout configurations.
Additionally, as content on kiosk-style displays could not be scrolled, each module needed to grow and shrink to fill available space without expanding beyond the visible viewport.
A conscious decision was made to avoid creating refined, pixel-perfect layouts too early in the redesign process. Using a monochrome colour palette and monospace fonts allowed us to conduct usability sessions that elicited more "focused" feedback.
The redesigned dashboard was deployed on the campuses of several sustainability-focused universities, including UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara. Customer and user feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
Energy competitions were incorporated into selected course curricula at each university. Professors were able to create and run energy competitions, and students were able to record their progress and monitor the effects of their sustainability efforts.
