Project Overview
Project Overview
The energy supply of renewable energies is inherently volatile, and this poses a challenge to adapting it as a primary source of energy supply. To make it a feasible solution, the oversupply and undersupply have to be balanced by shifting the demand. Energy storage or transportation is not an efficient way to solve this problem. We, the students of Hochschule Rhein Waal, followed GV’s five-day design sprint to answer critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas with customers. I worked together with my 5 team members throughout the sprint to come up with a solution.
The problem
Countries like Germany has made it a goal to switch to 100% renewable energy supply by 2050. However, the energy supply of renewable sources is inherently volatile.
My role
Storyboarding, Interface Design, Prototyping
The goal
Build a solution to help local communities to consume as much renewable energy as possible when it’s available & reduce the carbon footprint.
Tools Used
Figma, Miro, FigJam, Procreate
Design Process
Design Process
This project was all about following GV’s design sprint process. A Design Sprint is a unique five day process for validating ideas and solving big challenges through prototyping and testing ideas with customers. It’s like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service or a marketing campaign. It is not just about efficiency but also an excellent way to stop the old defaults of office work and replace them with a smarter, more respectful, and more effective way of solving problems that brings out the best contributions of everyone on the team and helps you spend your time on work that really matters.
In five days, the Design Sprint will help us to:
Understand. Map out the problem and pick an important area to focus.
Ideate. Sketch out competing solutions on paper.
Decide. Make decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis.
Prototype. Hack together a realistic prototype.
Test. Get feedback from real live users.
Day 01 (Map)
Day 01 (Map)
On Monday, we started the sprint by understanding the problem and choosing a target for the week’s efforts. With only five days, it might seem crazy to spend an entire day talking and writing on whiteboards. But if you don’t first slow down, share what you know, and prioritize, you could end up wasting time and effort on the wrong part of the problem.
Long-term Goal & Sprint Questions
The first step of the day is to set the long-term goal. “Why are we doing this project? Where do we want to be six months, a year or even five years from now?” This will serve as a beacon of light to keep everyone moving in the same direction. Once established, we turned the goals into actionable items by rephrasing assumptions and obstacles into sprint questions.
The long-term goal is to coordinate a local community of households to increase their share of renewable power by digitizing energy consumption in the most user-friendly way
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Making a map
A map is prepared by listing the customer and key players on the left side. Ending is made with a completed goal on the right side. We prepared a flowchart by connecting the left to the right with customers in the middle who interact with our product.
Expert Interview
A expert interview was conducted by the Facilitator (Professor) while we students made prepared the questions to be asked. The questions aimed to know more about their vision, customer research, how things works and their previous attempts to solve this problem. The interview was with data scientists from E.ON who provided valuable information.
HMW (How might we?)
The How Might We method is used to turn existing problems into opportunities. For example, if the problem is that “users don’t know when there is a surplus in renewable energy”, then the How Might We could be “how might we help the user be aware when there is renewable energy surplus?”.
Once we all put up our ideas to the board, we used the dot voting system to prioritise the How Might We notes and decide on which focus area to target for our sprint.
After the voting session we had 3 clear winners.
How might we,
bring together different households to make a significant impact?
achieve an automatic system that avoids inconvenience for the end user?
gather all real-time data in one place?
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Day 01 (Sketch)
Day 02 (Sketch)
After a full day of understanding the problem and choosing a target for our sprint, on Tuesday, we finally start focussing on the solutions.
Lightning Demos
Lightning demos encourage teams to research competitors and find examples of existing products that could serve as inspiration for our solution. Each of us selected 2 competitors and gave a 3 minute presentation of our finding about the app.
The Four Step Sketch
The four-step sketch method forces you to create solutions in an effective manner whilst iterating on each variation along the way.
Notes: Start with twenty minutes to take notes of the goal, opportunities and inspiration you’ve collected earlier on.
Ideas: Spend another twenty minutes drawing out rough ideas to form your thoughts.
Crazy 8s:. Take your strongest solution and sketch out eight different variations of it in eight minutes, known as the ‘Crazy 8s’ exercise.
Solution sketch: Draw a detailed end to end solution for the problem in the next thirty minutes or more.
Day 03 (Decide)
Day 03 (Decide)
With so many exciting solution now put up on the wall, it’s time to decide the right path to follow. Since not every solution can be prototyped, it’s time to critique each solution, and decide which ones have the best chance of achieving our long-term goal. We followed the following 5 steps to narrow down the strongest solution,
Art museum: Put all the sketches on a wall to create an art gallery. Ideally, the sketches should be anonymous, so the facilitator assisted with hanging them up.
Heat map: Each team member is given three dot stickers to assign to the sketches or parts of the sketches that they find interesting. This is to be done in silence.
Speed critique: Each member selects a drawing that is not their own and quickly walks through the solution, using sticky notes to capture the big ideas.
Dot voting: Each team member is given one vote (one dot sticker) to choose the best solution and justify their decision.
Supervote: The decider makes the final call with three votes (three dot stickers).
Once the voting was completed it was time to divide the winners from “maybe laters”. We had to split into 2 groups to create the prototype because there were conflicting ideas in the winners designs. We started developing the app idea with a storyboard.
Storyboarding
The main idea of the app was to encourage users to use more electricity during the peaks when more renewable resources of electricity are available. Users can complete missions (that help to shift electricity usage), and receive special sunny point award. Our goal also was to keep the users motivated to use the app. We came up with the concept of growing trees visualization: the more renewable electricity is used - the taller the tree. Based on this concept, I created a Storyboard.
Information Architecture
To be prepared for building the prototype the next day we also created an information architecture for our app so we have an head-start into Day 4.
Competitor analysis
We also built a quick comparison chart with the data we know from Day 2 so that we can place our product in a better positon.
Day 04 (Prototype)
Day 04 (Prototype)
It was finally one of my favourite days. It’s time to turn the storyboard into a visually appealing and user friendly prototype. After working as a group for 3 days, we had to split our work and take different responsibilities in order to have a successful sprint. There are 5 different roles,
Makers: Usually at least 2 designers or engineers responsible for creating the individual components of the prototype.
Stitcher: Either a designer or engineer should be collecting the components from the Makers and combining them into a seamless fashion.
Writer: Usually the product manager should be writing realistic text to ensure that the language makes sense to the user.
Asset Collector: They are responsible for scouring the web and image libraries to provide photos, icons or relevant content to assist the Makers.
Interviewer: They should write the interview script for Friday’s customer interviews.
I worked on the role of Maker and Stitcher in my team because of my skills and expertise. We chose Figma as a prototyping tool as it has agile features for collaborative work. Meanwhile, the interviewers prepared the consent forms, questionnaires and structure for the user testing. We created the first low-fidelity prototype and conducted the first usability interview with a user on the same day. That helped us to get initial feedback which we took into consideration during further development.
EnerTree
An app that encourages idividual households to consume renewable energy efficiently.
Renewable Energy Surplus Prediction
Engaging Missions and Achievements
Build up Influential Community
Make data accessible and easy to interpret
All in one place
Understand your energy consumption better
Personalize your rooms with the devices in them
Overview of your energy consumption
Extensive database of appliances and energy data
Contribute as a community to make bigger impact
Join your local community for a greener future
Understand what your community has accomplished
Bigger the community,
Bigger the impact!
More fun, higher motivation
Pick the missions you feel like you can do and take them on!
Grow your very own tree by fulfilling the missions
We got your back! We send notifications about energy spikes
It was challenging to finish this one day. We stayed up all night to come up with a testable prototype for the next day. We used several components for the data visualization to make it more appealing and easy to understand. The overall aim was to keep the app simple and fun to use. All the assets and color choices were made accordingly to maintain a casual and gamified theme across the app.
Day 05 (Test)
Day 05 (Test)
We followed the Nielsen model to conduct user tests with five participants who fit the target group. The rationale behind this is that testing more than five users diminishes the value of return since you will already have identified 85% of the problems after listening to five people.
With the questions and interview structure prepared by my other teammates the previous day, we conducted five usability tests. Four of them was online and one was in-person. We setup a room where only two interviewers were conducting the tests while the other teammates watched from the outside and made notes.
We had four scenarios for the test according to our flows:
Onboarding: Signing up, setting up the data about rooms and devices
Users find the onboarding screen explaining the aims of the app about the environment.
After logging in, users can create rooms and add utilities to them.
At the end of the first task, a user earns 20 sun points.
2. Completing the mission
Users should go to the dashboard and choose a mission. Each mission has difficulty, benefits, rewards, and impact ratio.
After accepting the mission (“doing laundry later on a certain off-peak hour”) the user sees a thank you message.
The next day at the given time the user gets a notification to set the washing machine after completing the task.
The user gains more sun points.
3. Looking at device consumption statistics
Users inspect the consumption of each utility by clicking the “my devices” button and observing a bar chart of weekly, monthly, and yearly electricity consumption.
Moreover, users may examine the overall contribution to the environment by adding more missions with a link at the bottom.
Joining a community
The community button on the dashboard takes users to a community frame where they can learn the total contribution of communities.
Users can join communities of their choice and follow the top contributors, as well as the total contribution of the town
During the Usability tests, we also addressed our sprint questions while interviewing the users. It turned out that none of our five participants used smart devices regularly. So the use of smart devices is not widespread yet. This feedback confirmed that focusing on conventional electronic devices is the right choice. We also gathered feedback about the app idea, as well as the interface features. We grouped the feedback into three clusters: positive, negative, and new ideas.
Results
The overall feedback from the users was very positive. Most of them liked the gamification aspect of the app and mentioned that it's a very straightforward and simple design. Some features like the sun points were not very clear for the user, because they didn't understand how to use them. Apart from that, some users mentioned that they are not comfortable with sharing personal data like their names in the community. We found out most households don’t own any smart devices at the moment. We also got some great ideas for the next updates.
Straightforward and simple design
Just the right amount of playful vibe
Illustrations and animations are nice
Liked the Gamification aspect of the app
Positives ✨
Clearer explanation of "Mission Difficulty"
Privacy could be a concern
Rewards were not clear how to use
Graphs not clear if it’s for my area or whole Germany
Room for improvement 📈
New Ideas 💡
Need some general tips on how to save energy
Include the sources of information
Connect community offline as well
Progress bar in the onboarding steps to keep the user informed
Explain clearly how to earn and use sun points
Reflection
Reflection
What worked about the sprint process?
The overall structure of the sprint was really good. The peer pressure to make decisions in a short time definitely brought the best out of everyone. The facilitators did a great job in conducting the design sprint and the team coordination was excellent in our group. The distribution of competencies within the group was balanced. Group size has always an important role when it comes to sustaining collaboration. We had keen group members who are resourceful with a wide range of skills and different backgrounds.
What didn’t work about the sprint process?
The beginning of the sprint started with an online session which made it harder to work as a group. I would say the expert meetings on the first day didn’t go that well. Since we were still trying to understand the problem we didn’t make good use of the expert interview. We didn’t have the list of questions prepared because we were still unclear about the process. This part could have been planned better, but overall I would say the goals for the design sprint were achieved.
My Learnings
This is my first experience with a Design Sprint. I really like this method of rapid iteration to arrive at a solution. Often times we find companies spend months on a software or a feature only to find at it is not what the user wants. I believe design sprint is great solution to find what the target audience really needs and if there is a potential for the software or feature. I was lucky to have a great team who all brought their unique skills and expertise which really helped us achieve this in 5 days. During the times while we were stuck, the facilitator and decider made a great job in pushing us forward. And this is the greatest learning for me, sometimes not everything has to be perfect to make progress. We just have to push through it with full confidence and we will save a whole lot of time and resource at the end.
Next steps
The immediate next step would be to work on the user feedback. Currently, there is no way to use the sun points, except to grow a garden. To motivate the users more, there needs to be a reward system, where the user can redeem sun points for coupons or discounts. For this to happen, we need to find partners and investors for our company. A stronger monetization model is needed to attract investors.
