HEEP- reaching the first milestone in the user's shoes

Entering the 4th week of our project and reaching our first milestone, I have to say that things have not been going according to our plans. Our initial notion that we got from the meeting with HEEP was to create a gadget that would display a "report card", "oil usage", and Cooling degree days". After getting some ideas on what to implement for each of these application, we requested for the necessary data from HEEP. Unfortunately, HEEP does not have the data that we needed at this moment, so we decided to generate our own data.

After our meeting with professor Johnson, we've realized that our implementation may not be the most practical considering that we're still not exactly sure on how they want to present those information. They know that they want a gadget that will display information to their users, but it may be that they themselves are still not 100% sure of what/how they want to do it at this moment.

So it was back to the drawing board and some critical thinking. But this time, we've removed the blinders and are thinking outside the box. We put ourselves in the user's shoes and thought of information that we want to see or use. Ideas started coming out since we stopped limiting ourselves to just using visualizations to present information. Some of these Ideas include:

• Appliance report card (rather than HEEP report card)
  
  
  
  • Compare top energyStar model to a cheap non-energyStar model
    
  • Show the amount of time it'll take to make-up the price difference from savings on electric bill
    
  • Show the total savings from the average lifespan of each of the appliance.
    
  
  
• Appliance Calculator
  
  
  
  • Allow users to compare their specified energyStar model to a cheap non-energyStar model
    
  • Calculate the amount of time it'll take to make-up the price difference from savings on electric bill
    
  • Show the total savings from the average lifespan of each of the specified appliance.
    
  
  
• Cooling Degree Days Calculator (Usage)
  
  
  
  • User enter power usage and temperature of a specific year
    
  • Calculate the total and percent of change in power usages per cooling degree day
    
  
  
• Cooling Degree Day Calculator (Generation)
  
  
  
  • User enter power generated for 2 specified years and base
    
  • Calculates the total and percent of change in power generation per cooling degree day
    
  
  
• Energy Generation (Visualization)
  
• Changes in Oil Consumption (Visualization)
  

From a user's point of view, we think that having these useful tools (calculators) would be a great addition to the page and rather than having a report card to display HEEP's performance, it would be more useful to have a report card that displays the appliance's performance instead. All of these are still just ideas that we intend to present to HEEP in the near future. We'll see what kind of feedback we're receive from them and continue from there. But I'm hoping that they'll be happy with these designs. I'll keep you guys updated