The set up

In October 2007, GE Energy signed a memorandum to deploy advanced energy delivery and metering technologies that will give residential and industrial consumers greater control over their energy usage and costs.  November 2007, Google announces investment in energy technologies marking the tipping point of a new era on our energy experience.  Just this month, Google revealed the iceberg tip of their Smart Meter consumer solution, harnessing the power of their analytic tool set, Google has settled in the keystone position of the smart meter user experience.

Earlier this month, Limina had the privilege to compete against leading technology consulting firms for a contract to research, design, deploy and test a consumer facing portal that would empower consumers to make the smart consumption decisions and, in the future, play a key role in consumption based home automation.

Much of how this future scenario is already in the works as demonstrated by LucidDesignGroup’s Building Dashboard product for schools, companies and homes.  With this dashboard you will, not only monitor and your building’s usage, but chart it against your usage history and, if you have on-site renewable power generation such as wind and solar, you can make smart decisions on when to sell back to the grid to maximize your return.

This display panel was featured in a Michelle Kaughman home on an Episode of NextWorld on the Science Channel, where she discussed live scenarios for home and energy automation with the dashboard as the centerpiece.

The Challenge:

1) Getting the energy providers, homes and consumers ready: In October 2008 the Government in the UK announced a mandate to have every household outfitted with gas and electricity smart meters by the year 2020.  On March 19 2009, www.whitehouse.gov posted the recovery act with an $11billion dollar investment in a smart-grid.  While there are no mandates, one can predict action is imminent.

2) Ubiquity: Google is about as ubiquitous of a technology service provider as you can get, their interest and investment in this space is a key indicator that this challenge will be met.  LucidDesignGroup’s Dashboard has thought forward to live case for interfacing with consumers in an easy to use way making the information and more importantly calls to action accessible and elegant.

Limina is always looking forward to turnkey technological and experience innovations in any industry, but has a special interest in contributing to the global efforts to reduce energy waste and build awareness in renewable resources.

-Jon Fukuda

Submit your RFP’s to services at limina-ao dot com

Design tips for Rich Clients

RIA’s have been sprouting all around us and every web application (and website) seems to have some ‘richness’ in the interaction that it provides to its users. From information browsing to task based applications, users now have a rich set of controls and interactions that allow them to have a more efficient and satisfying experience.

The interaction guidelines for making web applications ‘rich’ traditionally came from Rich clients (Desktop Clients). But as web applications were deployed in a web browser, they were unable to simply follow the guidelines; instead they had to adapt them to the platform.  As web applications evolved into RIA’s, they introduced some new interface and interaction styles.

Desktop applications have already implemented a few typical web idioms (Hyperlinks, Back buttons), and here are some newer interface and interactions that can be ported back to Rich Clients. These may not apply to all Rich clients but could be used creatively to enhance the user experience where possible.

Organizing without Menu’s (Tabs and toolbars)
Many RIA’s do not use traditional cascading menus as means of organising the applications functionality (normally this is to avoid having 2 sets of menus); instead they use tabs and toolbars. This reduces the time spent searching for functions and also allows for a better way to view and manage content.

Integrated popups

In order to reduce window clutter and to keep the interface visually lightweight, many RIA’s have rich interactive integrated pop-ups.  This allows the users to see the context of the popup content and also have multiple popups open. These popups can show details (Image and text) and also be used to add or edit object properties.

Motion

Although traditionally motion and animation has not been used widely, many RIA’s do a very good job of using transitions and effects to present information, convey organization and show movement from one part of the application to another. Motion provides the user with an added feedback of space and time rather than objects magically appearing and disappearing. Examples of this are: Steps in a Wizard flying in and out, panels sliding, window and objects growing/shrinking as they are brought into view.

Look and Feel/ Branding

Rather than simply inheriting from the operating system, RIA’s have their own look & feel and branding. We are seeing more of this in rich clients (Yahoo messenger, MS Office 2007), but there is a lot more that can be done to help products both stand out and achieve higher usability.

Although it may seem ironic that Rich clients are adapting designs from web applications, as designs evolve and more applications and users take to the internet, this maybe something that can help provide the users have a unified experience.

Creating and using the best design to make your product more usable is just one of the services provided by Limina.

-Vikram Dere