HEEP: Design iterations

This week after receiving more feedback from professor Johnson, we've made a few more changes to improve our applications. One change that was made, which affected all of our applications is the tab interface. We decided to removed the tab interface from our designs to give the web design company more freedom of implementing it on the page. Starting with the Negawatt application, we added a definition of a negawatt so users would know what a negawatt is, and we added more descriptions for the pie chart by adding in a legend. Below is a screenshot of the new negawatt application.



The next design change we've made was on the Top EnergyStar Model application. It's a small change suggested by Robert to rephrase the amount of money consumers can saved to the extra amount of money consumer will pay by NOT switching to an EnergyStar Model.



The Appliance calculator application that we've created was a good idea, but its an old idea and a version of it is already being used on the EnergyStar website. we tried to think of a way to apply it specifically to HEEP but we couldnt come up with anything so we decided to scrap that application.

A few other refinements that we've made were on the visualization applications. We decided to split the Energy Generation graph into 2 graphs to better represent what we're trying to show. The first of these graphs will show the projected energy consumption by percentage from each source and the second graph will show the energy consumption by its value from each source. We also added data for every year to make the graph look more proportional by years and an indicator line to show the beginning of the HCEI which will be used as the base value to meet HCEI's goal.



The final change we made was a small change to the Oil Consumption graph to change it to actual value rather than the difference between each year. This way it's easier for users to put large amount of oil that we're consuming into perspective.



We're hoping that after these changes, we can begin implementing prototypes for these applications. MileStone 2 is creeping up on us and we really want to have some deliverables to show the HEEP forks. Come back next week to hear the good news.