Exploring solar energy consumption on Mars.
Intro
I recently worked on a concept experience as part of a design challenge for a leading clean energy SF based company. It provided me the opportunity to breakout of the familiar loop I’ve been stuck in for the past few months with a chance of designing an interface that was not a financial product.
The opportunity to research and explore the current state of clean energy space within the limited time I had to turnaround this challenge was very educational and personally rewarding, and I intend to keep exploring the space further.
The Design Challenge
Design Brief
“You’re one of the first residents of the first colony on Mars. Every home has solar panels and a backup battery. When the sun is shining, the solar panels power each home and charge its backup battery. When the sun isn’t shining, like at night and during dust storms, any power each home needs can come only from its backup battery.
Life on Mars is hard, and most days you’re driving your battery powered rover around looking for new mineral deposits or overseeing progress at the various plantations.
Since you’re typically only at home when the sun is down, your rover needs to use your home’s backup battery to get the charge it needs for the following day.
The problem is, the battery in your rover is bigger than the battery in your home meaning if you let your rover fully charge at night, it will deplete your home’s backup battery. If this happens, your oxygen generators will shut off and it will be game over.
Up until this point, when residents plug in their rovers, they’ve been manually monitoring their backup battery levels via a touchscreen in each Martian home. The touchscreen also displays the battery level of their rover as it charges. Residents have to watch carefully and unplug their rover once it has a sufficient charge and before the home backup battery discharges to an unsafe level.
As a former UX designer back on Earth, you’ve been tasked with designing a new feature for the touchscreens. This feature will allow residents, including yourself, to control how much of their backup battery’s storage will be allocated for charging their rover at night. Note that some residents are home during some daylight hours and may not need to charge from the backup battery at all, and can charge directly from their solar panels, so the interface should allow for users to specify this behavior if desired.
The important thing is making sure this new feature is designed in a way that residents can start to leave their rovers plugged in whenever they’re at home knowing that a) their rover will always have enough power for the following day and most importantly, b) that their backup battery will never get fully discharged as this would lead to the Mars colony losing important residents!
We hope you have fun with the challenge, and look forward to experiencing your great design work.”
Solution
My process
I approached solving the challenge with the design thinking framework. I based a lot of the decisions that led to the solution you’ll see in the interface below purely on assumptions (as is the nature of these exercises);
Methodology: Design Thinking
Duration: 5 days
Role: Sole User Research & Designer
Tools: Figma
Learning outcome
Simplify and reduce cognitive load where necessary: During my presentation to the stakeholder, I was asked to clarify the energy allocation feature before he finally grasped the intent of the behaviour. This clearly indicated to me that the affordances and signifiers I chose were not intuitive at first glance. (It could have also been due to the fact that my presentation was not an interactive prototype that’d have conveyed the full depth and robustness of the solution) –In any case it was a friction point, and one I had not anticipated would arise.
I believe in a real-world scenario with user test sessions to validate my assumption and the subsequent iterative changes in the design process would mitigate user issues.
