*This project was done during the year 2020
Design Brief
Energy conservation and environmental impact have been a worldwide concern for years now. The alarming rate at which the crisis is growing is every individual's responsibility.
EnerServ* is an energy audit and smart energy management startup that helps households find ways and opportunities to conserve and manage energy efficiently. They are currently working on products & services through which family members could be well informed and manage energy consumption proactively while being at home and outside.
These are some of the insights received out of the discovery workshop
Why are we starting this initiative?
-> Develop and implement integrated energy service strategies that reduce and manage our client's costs.
-> Plan to reduce 10-40% of the energy cost.
How does the initiative fit in the big picture
-> Contribution to the mitigation of climate change.
-> Enhancement of social awareness
What does success looks like?
-> Improvement of the company image
-> Achieve long term
Problem Overview
According to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)
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By 2030, India seeks to double the global rate of improvement in energy efficiency.
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12.6% Still lack in modern electricity
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The ambitious renewable target of 175 GW
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500 Billion units of energy could be saved by energy efficiency
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Energy usage is doubled since 2000
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By 2030, substantially reduce waste generation through prevention, reduction, recycling and reuse.
Problem Approach
It's not necessary that you have to follow a particular design process but having a structured process helps to vision the solution much easier. In this casestudy, I have chosen the IDEO’s Human Centred Design, it's a process that starts by understanding the problem by interacting with the people and come up with the solution that are tailor-made for their needs.
Learn From People
1. Behavioural Research - Key Insights
Conducted surveys on people with the age group of 21-65 around 11 in numbers residing with/without family in a rented/owned apartments and house and arrived at the following assumptions.
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50% of the interviewees lived with parents or as a joint family
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42% of the interviewees says that other members in their family pay the bills
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62% of the bill payers face shocking experience seeing the increase in bill amount
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None of the interviews has the smart meter or any other tracking device to track the usage.
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All of the readings are manually taken by the electric person.
Problem Approach
It's not necessary that you have to follow a particular design process but having a structured process helps to visualize the solution much easier. In this case study, I have chosen the IDEO’s Human Centred Design, it's a process that starts by understanding the problem by interacting with the people and come up with the solution that is tailor-made for their needs.
Learn From People
1. Behavioural Research - Key Insights
Conducted surveys on people with the age group of 21-65 around 11 in numbers residing with/without family in a rented/owned apartments and house and arrived at the following assumptions.
-
50% of the interviewees lived with parents or as a joint family
-
42% of the interviewees says that other members in their family pay the bills
-
62% of the bill payers face shocking experience seeing the increase in bill amount
-
None of the interviews has the smart meter or any other tracking device to track the usage.
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All of the readings are manually taken by the electric person.
2. Attitudinal Research - Key Insights
Conducted an unstructured phone call with few of my friends and neighbours to understand in-depth of the problem and arrived at the following assumptions
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Unaware of slab price
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Difficult to track the power consumed just by assumptions
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Most of the house members are not co operating in turning off the appliances until asked them to
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Less awareness about the alternatives of energy-consuming appliances
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People estimate the value of energy consumption only when their bill tops. General social awareness about consumption and the future need is mostly taken for granted
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Most of their bills were estimated by a meter reading man, so they never knew if they were paying the right amount for their energy.
Learn From Experts
1. Sense Lab - Key Takeaways
Installs in the home's electrical panel and provides insight into your energy use and home activity through the application
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Let you know which device is ON
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Monitor your home energy form everywhere
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Set custom notifications for critical devices, like your sump pump, well pump, or flat iron
2. Energy Elephant - Key Takeaways
The App lets you take a photo of your electricity or gas meter to get your latest meter reading.
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Provides alternative options based on the usage
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Provides report on carbon emission
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Using past trends to estimate future energy cost for budget planning
These are some of the insights received out of the research phase
Lack of Transparency
-> The domestic consumers are left clueless what appliances consumes more energy after witnessing their higher electricity bill.
Lack of Awareness
-> Being only energy conscious person within the family/friends, it is often difficult to convince others to follow the same.
Mostly predictable
-> Consumer able to figure out the electricity bill during particular season or festival time
Prevention
-> Most of the consumers find hard to control the consumption of energy
Ideation
The Ideation phase transforms the research into meaningful and actionable insights that will become the foundation of the design. It’ll begin to make sense of what learned from the design research—drawing from everything observed and heard from the people its been designed for. Then, I’ll identify key themes and insights that will help to define opportunities for a design that are differentiated and generative.
It includes 5 stages
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Learnings — Downloading all the data to the individual sticky notes
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Themes — Grouping them on similarity and labelling them.
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Key Insights — Takeaways from the learnings
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How Might We Questions — Converting the key insights to the HMWs
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Ideas — Picking up each HMW’s and coming up with the possible solutions
Wireframes
I sketched quickly to design the layout and the functionality of the application based on the ideas generated during the synthesis process. Wireframes help to establish the basic structure of the product before visual design and the content is added to it.
Styleguide
Started with the inspiration board and picked out the most relevant themes and collated them to a Styleguide, it helps to set standards and rules that is to be followed to improve the digital presence of the product.Based on the user research I made an assumption that the user might be looking for more simple calm and transparent UI.
Onboarding
Onboarding helps guide the users to get familiarise with the application. It enables businesses to strategically communicate with their users, expressing the app’s value and facilitating positive user experience.
Live Tracking
The primary action elements in live tracking are the cost and energy consumption toggle. According to the user research, the primary assumption was that there were two types of user - energy conscious and money conscious.
Social Comparison
Applying one of the cognitive bias - Social Proof: a term coined by Robert Cialdini in his 1984 book, Influence, is also known as informational social influence. It describes a psychological and social phenomenon wherein people copy the actions of others in an attempt to undertake behaviour in a given situation. I have used this concept to bring behaviour nudge that helps the user to act in the desired way - in our case energy consumption.
Device Level Consumption
It displays the energy consumed by each device. The energy is monitored through the power sensor installed in the electric panel. User can set energy limit per-device level if the device is been running idle for more than a particular time it will alert the user via the application or via smartwatch.
User Journey
Comparison of the user journey before and after use of volta
My Learnings
Solving a social problem is both challenging and rewarding at the same time, In the beginning, the problem was very broad and I had no clear idea to it, but following the human-centred design process step by step, it helped me to split my one huge problem statement into multiple chunks of small problems that helped me to organise my vision towards the problem. A solution does not appear from a single mind but by collaborating with beautiful minds we can arrive at a clear solution. I understood the needs of the user by surveys and interviews that helped me to derive to the solutions to my problem statement. Finally the most challenging part is to create an application that is engaging both in user experience and visual design perspective.