ux

Building Smarter: Designing Dashboards for Energy Management

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[This post is based on Givannah Noor‘s Master Information Science Thesis]
Dashboards are essential for data-driven decisions, but effective design, especially for smart building and energy management, is often overlooked. Givannah Noor’s thesis, “Brick by Brick: A Human-Centered Approach to Effective Dashboard Design for Smart Building and Energy Management,” tackles this gap head-on.

At Arnhems Buiten, an IoT pilot site and part of the HEDGE-IoT project, a specialized dashboard was developed to monitor various devices. Givannah took a human-centered approach, conducting stakeholder interviews to uncover pain points and key needs. These insights informed the development of a high-fidelity prototype. To that end, she conducted several interviews with stakeholders, developed personas, scenarios and prototypes.

The overview page in the hi-fi prototype
The insights page in the hi-fi prototype

The prototype was then evaluated with stakeholders using a think-aloud technique. The findings revealed that effective dashboard design goes beyond typical UI/UX principles, emphasizing the crucial role of storytelling and designing for predictive analytics. This research offers valuable insights for creating dashboards that truly meet the complex needs of smart building and energy management, and improve how we visualize future trends.

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UI for Polyvocal Provenance Reporting

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[This post is based on Bella Abelardo‘s Master Information Science thesis, “Designing a User Interface for Provenance Reporting of Objects with Colonial Heritage”]

Bella’s thesis addresses a critical challenge in cultural institutions: representing multiple perspectives for colonial heritage items. Current systems often create a “singular truth” in provenance reports, and unstructured data hinders discoverability.

Bella’s goal was to create a user interface to help provenance researchers holistically document the “polyvocal knowledge” often present in colonial heritage objects. Her research intended to explore improvements to the popular TMS content management system. To this end, she conducted interviews with various domain experts to gather design requirements and built a prototype, CultureSource.

two figures showing the lo-fi design of the improved user interface (imgs: B. Abelardo)

The evaluation showed CultureSource’s potential to help researchers document multiple perspectives. Bella’s research provides key requirements—standardization, multiple perspectives, usability, and data management—for future user interfaces aimed at documenting complex, multi-layered histories.

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