Renewable Energy Management System
ABB
Team
5 people
My Role
Lead Researcher and Test Conductor
Duration
One semester
Deliverables
Research Document
Design Document
Working Prototype
The
Challenge
For this project, we were tasked with providing a solution that met the needs of “behind the meter” customers (including industrial or manufacturing facilities, commercial buildings, small municipalities, hospitals, and universities). These customers are not traditional power plant operators which led us to our main problem to solve that ABB didn’t have intimate knowledge of their end users in this market and therefore didn’t know how best to design the UI/UX.
Users and Use Cases
The primary customer focus for this project was universities, and more specifically, the energy plant managers in charge of energy management at universities. The typical user of this system doesn’t want to see the typical power plant interface because they will not know how to use it but the system should also be able to convey that the diagnostics of the energy consumption are working and that it is automatically working. A few things that are important to the user are reliability, optimization, and cost management.
There were four primary use cases that ABB wanted us to focus on:
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Minimize site-generated emissions
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Minimize electricity cost
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Maximize grid independence
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Minimize peak energy consumption from the grid
Based on research, we narrowed our focus to one use case, minimizing electricity cost.
Research
Secondary Research
Most of our Secondary Research consisted of research into more about energy, electricity, and energy management. We came into this project without a very strong understanding of any of these areas, so we needed to start off with strong secondary research to get us well acquainted with this information.
Our Secondary provided the footing for our group to begin to understand more about this field. With the gained knowledge of industry standards and language, we were able to go into our primary research with enough knowledge to be able to speak to an expert in the field. Because of this, we were able to build a strong repertoire with our users.
Primary Research
We reached out to the directors of energy and utility at both Purdue University and Indiana University and interviewed each of them. We built a strong relationship with Dan the Strategic Energy, Risk, and Data Analysis Manager at Purdue’s Utility Plant Office Facility who also participated in our co-design. Overall insights from these 3 interviews were the importance of cost, especially for universities since the cost of the energy has an impact on student’s tuition rates. We were also able to distinguish between a university user which creates some of their own energy (Purdue) and a university user that buys all of their energy from other sources (Indiana University) which was an important distinction to keep in mind during design.
Design Review
We conducted a design review of ABB’s current renewable energy management system demo to identify things we liked and disliked as well as find areas of opportunity for improvements based on the current designs and design principles.
Co-Design
After our research, we decided to do a co-design workshop because we wanted our users to provide their expert opinions and have a say in the designof our interface. The users we talked to in our research have been in the industry for a long time and understand the content of the system much better than we do. They have used other systems in the past and know what they want to see and what they don’t want to see. We found their opinions very valuable and wanted to take them into our design.
The first activity included affinity diagramming about renewable energy management systems (REMS) to help us find out what participants expected to see and understand how participants grouped terms related to renewable energy. From this activity, we found that reports should be dynamic and data-driven as well as presented easily to identify the economics of the data.
For the second activity, we gave participants images of current energy management systems to understand any pain points, data visualization preferences, and priorities users may have. From this activity, we discovered that an executive summary is very important for our users that displays trends and costs very easily. Our users also expressed preferences to drop-down menus where they can go deeper into detailed data and that too much customization is actually bad.
The third activity included a section for participants to sketch or ideate any visualizations they believed would be important for their needs/goals. From this activity, we found that data from each source (wind, solar, etc) should be clear and show current conditions as well as having data be in real-time and automatically updated.
Design
Sketches
In order to kick off the design phase of this project, we looked to our results from our research and co-design in order to inform our design decisions. We started off by diverging and whiteboarding the layout of the REMS as well as figuring out the content that needed to be included on each page. We then dove into sketching with several 2-3 minute rounds of sketching. Individually, we started off with an idea/layout for the REMS, then built upon our sketches with each round. In the end, we came together and consolidated the most important parts of our sketches and transitioned into wireframes.
Wireframes
After consolidating our sketched designs, we created high fidelity wireframes collaboratively on figma. The included pages were an executive overview, deeper overview, settings, individual reports, comparison reports, generation, consumption, and forecast page.
We walked through the wireframe with one of our users, Dan (who we interviewed and participated in our co-design), and asked him if the wireframe made sense and would satisfy his needs. He enjoyed the “snapshot” overview page and the ability to change the KPI’s on the settings page. He also expressed that he would like to compare different types of data over the same period of time, rather than just see the same types of data over different periods of time. We then made minor changes in our wireframe from this feedback and presented it to our sponsor with ABB.
