A little background
I’ve always been drawn to making facts more visually interesting. When I was about 10 years old I remember sitting in my grandma’s swiveling armchair, reading through this big book of graphs. Mostly odd statistics, like “How many Americans buy a new toothbrush every 6 months”. I couldn’t get enough of the way they made each statistic visual. You immediately got it.
User interface (UI) is a fancy term for something people need to interact with on a computer to get information. Every website is a UI. This UI is for an online software product, and it just so happens to be a UI full of information people need to “get.” It is right up my alley.
How can you see energy use?
The information people need to get by using this product is energy use. How is my company doing? How can we improve? Being an online software product, it needed to function as intuitively as possible while providing many levels of information — from a simple, quick dashboard view to the down-and-dirty data tables. Creating something this powerful was exciting to me, because energy use isn’t blatantly obvious. You can’t see it or touch it. Until software like this comes along.
User-led design & development
EnergyPrint brought together a team of design (myself, and Azul 7), and talented developers (from the Ackmann & Dickenson group). They also took a very important step in setting the stage with brand work and logo design with a local designer and brand strategist, Brent Marmo of Design:Marmo. During the entire process EnergyPrint also held user group sessions that gave us ongoing, user-based feedback that helped guide the UI design and development.
Selling it
I also designed the marketing site — just a regular website — that quickly gives interested parties an overview on what this software service provides. It’s often the first chance a potential customer may have to get a taste of what the EnergyPrint software can do: which in a nutshell, is to help corporations see their energy use so they ultimately use less, save money, and run a more efficient property (or bunch of properties).
The team at EnergyPrint is continually working on updates and enhancements, still guided by their dedicated user group. I look forward to watching the company and its product thrive and succeed.
