Design Better

Team: Rishabh Bhardwaj and Sean Warsaw

Timeframe: Less than two weeks

Design Challenge: Design an interactive thermostat with great learnability that will help encourage energy conservation. 

Design Direction: We decided to focus on designing a simple interface that would help users understand how to properly use thermostats and how much energy is being expended during use. 

Predispositions & Research: Growing up with thermostats in my home, I thought that everyone understood how they worked and the best practices for energy conservation. But as I learned during this project, although assumptions are common in life, they are often deeply flawed and inaccurate. To gain a better understanding of how people used thermostats and how to use them efficiently, we created a survey and asked roughly 10 college students or recent graduates. The results proved overwhelming that many people felt they did not understand how to use them efficiently, and so they avoided using them altogether. 

Insights: Given that most people reported that they did not understand how to use them efficiently, we decided to build a thermostat that would provide greater transparency between how the system works and how much energy is being consumed. We also wanted the system to be easy to use and have great learnability. 

Concepts: For this project, we designed several possible versions of what information could appear on the UI. The central feature of our design was to limit the information on the display, as well as a color indicator with text providing immediate feedback about the corresponding energy consumption. We felt that these features could reduce the likelihood of misuse because users would need to familiarize themselves with how to adjust the temperature with this device. One version displayed the current temperature between a higher and a lower temperature in a dial display. Although this display helped us achieve a lot of the requirements of this challenge, we decided to continue designing alternative versions to find the right design. Our final design was a simple touchscreen interface that allows users to easily adjust the temperature up or down. We also added a bar that shows how much energy will be consumed by adjusting the temperature.  

Prototype:

My Role: My main contributions on this project were questionnaires, ideation, comparative analysis, personas, user scenarios and usability protocols. 

Postmortem: During this project, I learned the importance of usability protocols throughout the design process. While we thought the usability for our device was good, we found that some testers were confused with the glider that adjusts the temperature.