WindCash
Team: Ben Stone, Yoon Young Kim, Hailey Motooka
My role: Researcher, Lead Interaction Designer
Windstax is a full-service developer of integrated alternative energy solutions. The company pioneers in large vertical wind turbines and microgrids, which are changing the industry’s perspective of energy as a commodity to energy as an opportunity.
The goal of this project was to consider the company’s business model in a holistic manner and design a digital solution that can better the company’s current services and operations.
Exploring the problem space
Stakeholder Mapping
To start off, we first wanted to understand Windstax's current business model and analyze all of its stakeholder groups in order to identify concrete design opportunities.
Specifically, we identified three main stakeholder groups: Windstax employees (in blue), end users (in pink), and external stakeholders (in green) including policy makers and competitors.
Overview of Current Business Model:
Based on our research, we learned about all the different relationships between Windstax, the customer, the local utility grid, and wholesale markets. As the diagram indicates, there is an opportunity to forge a relationship between Windstax energy and Wholesale Markets.
Granular View of Current Business Model:
Focusing solely on the distribution of energy collected from the wind turbines, we see that the collected wind energy can be distributed in one of two ways: 1) Directly for the customer to use or 2) towards the local utility grid to be dispersed again to other customers.
Refining the design direction
In order to ideate concepts for any design opportunities, we executed the “Reverse Assumptions” activity in order to develop and generate new ideas. The goal of was to generate a long list of assumptions and then reverse them in order to ideate new concepts.
Together with what we found in our research, we delineated three design opportunities:
1. "Building Together":
Currently, WindStax oversees the entire process: from design, to manufacturing, to installation. Can the consumer help out at any point to be able to give more direct input?
2. "Improved Usage":
WindStax installs a wind turbine, and has access to the user’s energy consumption data. Using this data, can WindStax help improve and reduce the consumer’s energy usage?
3. "Personalised Data"
Right now, the consumer has no idea about the impact they’re making, or the money they are saving. How can WindStax better communicate the information of the consumer’s wind turbine to the consumer?
We saw the most potential with the third direction - "Personalised Data". Previously, we had found a missing link between Windstax and energy wholesale markets in Windstax's current business model. Combining this opportunity with our newfound direction, we decided to build a mobile service that includes:
End User Facing Service: helps consumers manage their individual energy usage
Business Facing Service: helps Windstax trade and sell leftover customer energy back to the wholesale market
Overview of Proposed Business Model:
Our mobile application completes the energy exchange circle by adding a connection between Windstax energy and the wholesale markets, where unused energy from customers would be distributed to.
Granular View of Proposed Business Model:
Our mobile service incentivises consumers to reduce their energy consumption by allowing them to return any unused energy back to Windstax in exchange for credit / money.
Materialising our idea
After deciding our design direction, we quickly sketched several concepts that seemed promising. We consolidated the screens that we felt worked together the best, which then formed the basis for our low-fidelity prototype shown below.
Low-Fidelity Prototype
Business-facing Interfaces:
At a high-level, the Windstax-facing screens display the current statuses of the turbines, as well as the trade market for renewable energy.
Consumer-facing Interfaces:
The consumer-facing screens include usage breakdown with personalised recommendations, energy usage by week/month/year, and options for cashing out their Windstax credit.
Medium-Fidelity Prototype
Business-facing Interfaces:
We continued to iterate on the Windstax facing interface, but mainly for a proof of concept, rather than to be included in the final demo as we decided to focus on the consumer facing interface hereafter.
Consumer-facing Interfaces:
For the consumer-facing screens, we received feedback that suggested a more interactive data display. We started prototyping ways in which users could interact with the data through goal-setting to encourage behavioral change.
Micro-Interaction Design
Initially, we designed an information display that shows the distribution of customers’ energy usage across different utilities . But we soon realised that if the goal of our app is to incentivise energy saving, we needed to help customers learn exactly what they can do.
We also realised that for a typical end user, “saving X kWh” is not nearly as informative as saying “taking one fewer shower”. Thus, translating abstract units of kWh into tangible behaviours can make the energy-saving suggestions much more realisable and actionable. We spent some time just prototyping different ways of visualising this.
Final Design:
To help users understand how to change their behaviours to save energy, we designed interactive sliders for each of these utilities. The sliders rest at the current usage level, which users can then adjust to understand how each change affects their savings in dollars, enabling them to set goals that are both personalised and attainable.
We also added an additional functionality where the users can choose to let the app auto-generate a usage recommendation for them. This is to further simplify the goal-setting process without compromising the flexibility of users have in personalising the settings.