Week 6: Competition layout

To educate students in the University of Hawaii about energy conservation we're creating a competition to encourage lower usage of electricity..

After starting on a new approach to creating content for our Kukui Cup Energy Dorm Competition, the members and I started making a second set of mockups for the second date in the timeline October 4th, 2010. That is the planned first day of the competition. Basically we create the pages and content that will be on the site in a mockup form. At this point we try to add as much content as makes sense.

My responsibility was for the energy data content on the site. In the previous week we had worked on the site on the day of September 9th 2010. Once I got some comments, I make some improvements for that. After that, I started on the energy data for October 4th.

I decided focus on a new approach to what the user would see. Most users who visit this page would probably want information to help them win the competition. I made some indications of their progress. I gave them knowledge of when they had their highs and lows of energy consumptioon and also if they had reduced their consumption. However, that is what I plan to show. Given that October 4th is the first day, the mockup isn't that great in showing reduction and more information.

I also made a different way of accessing the granular data for the charts. Charts are secondary at this point. I decided to focus less on the charts and more on data that the user might want to know instead. Basically I created a sort of directory selection for the user to choose. All the subselections for a particular week is hidden until the user clicks on the triangle button to traverse the directory. The dropdown boxes are then revealed after you click on the triangle. When you choose a hour or day option, you submit once again. At this point I think it seems kind of complex and may hinder usage. But it seemed like a good idea because it saved space.
Most of what I've done is toward creating all the possible views of this selection system. You can look at a detailed explanation at the project site. here

Week 5: Timeline

To educate students in the University of Hawaii about energy conservation we're creating a competition to encourage lower usage of electricity..

After our 1st milestone we were directed to begin setting a timeline mockup of the Kukui Cup dorm energy competition. Basically this week, we set out to make mockups of a specific time during the competition. In order to fully understand what we needed, we began mapping out these details for the competition site.

We are focusing on the week before the competition begins. The UH dorm energy issues site will contain material already before a competition starts. That is where we want to begin.

For my part I made mockups for one section of the site, energy data. This is a page that shows raw or contextualized data to a user. I plan on making several ways to display this data of energy consumption in order. What I've made so far is a chart for different time intervals and also a real time text display for 10 sec updates.

Our project milestone description:

http://code.google.com/p/uh-dorm-energy-competition/wiki/mockupMilestone2?ts=1266310825&updated=mockupMilestone2#energy_data

I have to admit that the selections aren't the best right now. I plan to add more functionality to the options. The hous selection is allowed to only choose a hour in the current day. And it's not quite clear for that either. I definitely need to make some changes to make the options more intuitive and explanatory.

In terms of the data I also want to look into other ways to show the user what the values mean and what it represents.

For this week we'll improve upon the mockups and then work on the mockups during the competition phase.

Week 4: Our first MileStone

The Kukui Cup Competition development is underway in its fourth week. To educate students in the University of Hawaii about energy conservation we're creating a competition to encourage lower usage of electricity..

This past week our group really came together and talked over what we wanted to accomplish. In the end we actually got something done. Our meeting on friday was really productive. So it started on tuesday when we presented our findings and then set out to work on our own set of tasks. I ended up making mockups to show how users could look at a chart to determine their energy usage over an interval of time and also through monetary costs. I spent much of the time before friday on the mockups and thinking about how to display rankings.
During the meeting on friday we talked over what to do next. Professor Johnson had suggested previously on an email that we show what we had and start to focus on getting together a final product. So that's what we did. It turned out to be the most productive we've been in this entire project! We discussed the fundamental requirements this energy issues website and what was really important. We managed to get it down to four main pages, the home page, contacts page, resources page, and the Kukui Cup Competition page.
Once we got that down we started plotting out what was needed on those pages. Basically we did a lot of planning for what was needed. Over the weekend we set out to creature the pages and content. These are the mockups and graphics that I made.

These three mockups demonstrate different time intervals that a user can sample to show energy consumption. Also notice the cost of electricity on the top right corner of the chart.




This is the content I made specifically for our home page. It is a ranking diagram for students in the two dorms Mokihana and Lokelani. Each floor is competing to win their own type of prize concurrently with the dorm competition.

Although these meters aren't probably going to be used, I'd like to show how we're trying to display data in different ways for the students.

I really liked this pie chart because of it's simplicity. It can show users how they are progressing compared to the previous weeks in a quick intuitive way.


This last mockup is the competition page I presented to my group in our meeting today. It contains data for large intervals and also real time data that covers usage within 10-20 seconds. Some parts of this will be in the final product.

I think the meetings are essential to our progress in this project. We need to talk more about what needs to be done and generate new ideas in order to continue to improve upon this project.

Dorm Energy Competition Design: week 3

For this project a set of well defined goals we do not have. It's been difficult trying to come up with ideas to work toward and I think that's one of our groups main challenges. Yet we've been able to come up with enough ideas to work toward and achieve a certain amount of progress. For instance I had an idea on thursday to use the data generated by WattDepot our software tool that outputs energy usage to provide more information to the users.
So that's what I did. I made mockups of how graphs would be represented depending on the length of time. So if you wanted to look at a week long graph of KW/HR then it will also calculate the total KW/HR used and then convert it to dollars. Hawaii is the state with the highest price of energy in the United States. If students are to become energy literate, learning about our high prices would be a good incentive to begin. Another thing I did with this was in listing the possible ways to show the KiloWatt Hour. If we can make more tangible relations to other values with the KiloWatt Hour, maybe students will get a better grasp of what it is. So I got ideas to convert the data to carbon output in tons, or the fuel used.
I've also started to work on making a ranking system for display purposes. I'm not exactly sure how to work it out yet. The important thing is to figure out a way to display the energy consumption per floor for the dorms and also show rankings for the floors for Kukui Nuts. This goes back to scoring and I think it's worth further investigating into.
A topic that Professor Johnson proposed was of a permanent site to host all energy matters for the dorms or campus. It would either have a link that to the Kukui competition or inactive part of the site that would take over during the competition schedule and then fall back afterwards. I thought it was a good idea so my teammate Anthony and I drew up a quick mockup to see what it would look like. It gave us a some thought into how to properly introduce our project. Because on the mockup, there is a reference to a video which gives our mission statement. It might be cool to just make a small clip to frame our objectives.
So I think there's a lot more to be done. I could work on the ranking display, creative more displays for the values, or explore more ideas on this permanent site. My primary focus is on the data.

These are the mockups I updated. They are labelled charts.

http://code.google.com/p/uh-dorm-energy-competition/source/browse/#svn/mockups/TeamGreenSmart

This is for the permanent page.

http://code.google.com/p/uh-dorm-energy-competition/source/browse/#svn/mockups/freshmanDormEnergyIssue

Week 2 Kukui cup design

In the 2nd week of the design process I've looked at more dorm room competition sites to get acquainted with the common things. This Kukui cup is a competition that tries to educate users about energy conservation. This week in our meetings, we have nailed down some fundamental ideas for what the competition is about. We've discussed prizes, scoring system and cohesion within the dorms. All our discussions have led to small changes in our wiki pages in the project site. http://code.google.com/p/uh-dorm-energy-competition/w/list

Prizes are an issues because of funding and being able to still maintain excitement for the competition. Right now we're not sure what the prizes will be, but it seems we do need to give out individual small ones and also a reward for the winning dorm and floors. I just wonder whether giving too many rewards will dilute the enthusiasm for this competition and keep students from thinking about the main competitive spirit for the rivaling dorms.

Scoring is based on energy consumption, reduction and something we call kukui nut points. The KN points are something that can contribute to energy literacy by rewarding individuals who participate beyond just using electricity. They are doing things that can teach them what energy conservation is about.

Lastly cohesion is an issue because we realized that the chosen dorm called Frear Hall may not be a good candidate for the competition due to the demographics and setting. It seems Fear Hall is more of a conservative dorm that doesn't interact as much as the other towers in the UH Manoa campus. This is very important because participation depends on enthusiasm for this competition and to get students interested in energy conservation early.

I'm planning to look over more competition this week and work on the goals our group has set for this week. I'd also like to mention that I've been granted a license for using a mockup tool called Balsamiq. The staff at Balsamiq has been generous enough to give me a free license in order to work on this project. You can take a look at their site here. I'm still playing with the program, but I've created a page to show as an example.


Overall, I'm still struggling to think up ideas. I'm not sure what I can contribute to the design yet in a significant way.

Kukui Cup Competition

I'm in a new class ICS414 and a new project. If you think dorm rooms are tough as it is, wait till the students compete for bragging rights and a reward.

The Kukui Cup is a dorm room competition that pits different dorms against each other by recording their electrical usage. My groups role in this project is to design the competition and it's rules, the web applications and how information that will be displayed.

My initial thoughts about this are that the site has to have both an utility feel and a colorful scheme. Since this is a competition I think it's appropriate to make the site colorful. It's because I'm interested in the aesthetics of the site. So I took a lot at some of the other dorm energy competitions from other universities. Here is a look at the MIT layout of information from their competition. MIT In brief, it appears to be lacking in content. For example, it has charts for different dorms, yet it does not offer information with granularity in a small scale. My professor has suggested it for our project and it is very important in my opinion as well. Students need to connect their actions with the meter system. Being able to see your own usage data will really encourage participation. Each student can see what electrical appliances can do and it can even fun to play around them to see sucks the most electricity.

I have done research into the look of these "utility sites" by tallying up the colors of sites. I studied sites like the HECO site and Hawaiian Telcom. It seems blue is a really popular color, and the look somewhat better than the dorm room competition sites. I also looked at these pages specifically to get an understanding of how sites should look. I have some ideas for this design project.

There also needs to be planning of the design. A good hierarchy is also important, which is why a "web" diagram should be created to clearly show how the all the pages relates back to the home page. I've installed Balsamiq a software tool that allows anyone to creative mockups of sites or any Graphic User Interface by just plugging in objects the user wants to have in their project. It works pretty much like powerpoint, where you create text boxes and insert images, and dragging them around to suite your tastes.

This is where I'm at right now. Expect updates on our group work soon.
Here is the link to the project site.
http://code.google.com/p/uh-dorm-energy-competition/

ICS 413 Soft Engineering final thoughts

ICS 413 seemed valuable because it may be the only class that teaches how to program in a professional setting. That's what I thought at first. What I think I'll value from this class most is the level of preparation I received in programming and project management. Over the course of this semester our class worked on continuous integration tools, open source software development, project health and even making a portfolio. These things are really crucial to preparing me and making me feel prepared for a professional career in programming.
I'll start off by saying that the lecture videos aspect of this class was helpful in constantly reminding me how things should be. As helpful as a lecturer may be, I don't think people are comfortable making professors repeat a certain topic over and over again.
Software Integration is a topic I was not familiar with at the beginning of this class, but now I can understand it and appreciate the role it plays in making a project that has good flow. It can help programmers make progress, and what's more important is that it makes things a lot faster and easier.
Open source software was something I had a idea about, but now I got the history of it as well. It's given me perspective about the technology world and society as it is today. This idea of sharing software and making contributions to a project is very comforting. If the world is truly connected, then anybody can contribute. I am very excited about the idea of many people sharing and contributing to the body of work in any project. I'd like to think it is perpetuating progress. History has shown that communication and the distance between people has been a big road block to the sharing of ideas and advancements in technology.
This semseter we also used something called software ICU. I wasn't not familiar with it at all and didn't know you could do something like that. We setup sensors in the programs we used like eclipse and ant. Then when we used those programs it showed how well we used them and how often. It is a reflective way of looking at our progress in a project and whether the habits are healthy. If progress is steady and updates are added incrementally then it's healthy. However, it can also show that you spent the whole night before the due date working on the project in order to get it done. I think it is very practical to use this to kind of keep yourself honest.

Lastly I was able to develop my online persona using this blog and through working on the projects. It's a big plus! I was really scared that once I graduated I wouldn't have anything to show propective employers. I'm always getting emails from my counselor with employers asking for people in the field that have a year or two of
programming experience. How can I have experience if nobody hires me?

Overall, this class has been a positive influence on me because of how many I learned. Of course I had to work my butt off to get a good grade. I think it's made me a better programmer.