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The case study is divided into the following sections. Feel free to jump around!
Endress and Hauser is a company that manufactures IoT-based precision measurement instruments such as flow meters, pressure meters, level meters, etc. which can transmit readings over the internet.
The company also sells a suite of digital products called Netillion Water Network Insights (NWNI) which works with IoT-based sensors to provide various water network insights in the Food & beverage, wastewater, and chemical industries.
To better understand how water treatment plants work, E+H connected us with Citizen's Energy which is a company that owns water treatment plants in downtown Indianapolis.
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Users can build custom statistics and build custom charts out of one or more readings that will be connected to the smart E+H sensors or to live excel sheets.
Users can start discussions on every section of the UI for smoother communication within the organisation. These discussions can be turned into tasks that can be assigned to people within the organisation.
All discussions and tasks can be found in one place. Users can travel back in time to view past discussions and tasks.
Users can build report templates using UI component IDs (time-range in this case) as placeholders. When the user clicks on "Download" the system will populate the placeholders with the corresponding values.
Users can view all the E+H sensor connections and the connected excel sheets in one place along with their health (using E+H's Heartbeat Technology) and replacement recommendations.
Interviewed the following stakeholders -
And conducted a field visit of the Citizen's Energy Indianapolis water treatment plant (to understand how water treatment works)
I along with the team posted all our findings on a Figjam board where we used affinity mapping to identify themes and group findings according to themes.
Here are some of the key insights from our research -
Companies with a better sustainability footprint attract more talent and business.
Companies with a better sustainability footprint attract more talent and business.
Companies are ramping up their spending on sustainable activities.
With companies willing to spend, there is room for building a profitable product.
The current process of collecting data, generating a report, and devising a sustainability strategy takes over 80 hours.
An ideal solution would reduce this time drastically.
Replacing sensors and infrastructure happens very rarely in the water treatment industry.
An ideal solution would be one that not only works with the new E+H smart sensors but also provides backward compatibility for other sensors that are currently in use.
Microsoft sustainability cloud
Salesforce Net Zero Cloud
Benchmark ESG
Niras SDG
The shortcomings we found in these competitors
Any solution we conceptualize needed to -
For the ideation phase, we conceptualized 3 features for each major pain point and voted internally(shown by the stamps) to finalize a set of features in the final product. The features in blue are the features that I conceptualized.
In order to finalize an idea we ran the Plant Manager and the Environmental Steward at Citizen's Energy, as well as the E+H Sponsor through our ideas and finalized the following set of features.
Home
Memory Palace
Data Connections
Next, I converted all of the sketches into a medium-fidelity Figma prototype which we could use to perform usability tests.
Charts and Annotations
Memory Palace
Data Connections
Report Generation
To check out the full mid-fi prototype, click here.
Next, I evaluated the medium-fidelity prototype with the Plant Manager and Environmental Steward at Citizen's Energy and the E+H sponsor and found the following key issues with our design.
This was an interesting and challenging project where we got to learn about an entirely new domain that we had no familiarity with. Overall we are all proud of the outcome of the project and the growth we all experienced. Special thanks to Matt Walsh from E+H, Justin Redman, and Anne McIver from Citizen's Energy for their time and effort in helping us throughout the design process. Finally, this wouldn't have been possible without our mentor Professor Lou Lenzi whose insights and mentorship were the guiding lights throughout this project.
The team with Matt Walsh and Justin Redman at the Water treatment plant.
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