Sustainability Blog Posts

In Part I of this two part blog series, I talked about the need to look for climate change energy adaptation technology that can reduce demand for electricity while we bring (or in lieu of bringing) replacement clean energy technology online. There are a number of very viable solutions that address this on a technological level including:

• Energy management and reporting software to identify and prioritize energy management issues, operate critical energy endpoints at optimal efficiency levels and validate investment decisions
• Building information management (BIM) systems to design for and monitor energy efficiency/maintenance
• Demand Response control system that optimize visibility into and analysis of mission-critical energy information along with reporting interfaces that communicate the need for load shedding to customers, turn kilowatt reductions into actionable price information and verify compliance.

But hardware and software are not enough. While control equipment and sophisticated application software determines how electricity demands are regulated, people still make the decisions on whether to invest in these systems and continue to use them. That's where user experience design comes in.

Principles of Design for Climate Change Energy Adaption Applications

In this post, I want to give a sampling of key principles that are needed for the design of successful climate change energy adaptation applications, particularly those delivered as SaaS or on mobile. These principles are just a few selected best practices we have developed from work on just under 400 applications (desktop, web/SaaS, and mobile). Also see our "Principles of SaaS Design" white paper for general guidelines that apply to any SaaS implementation.

Design for non-technical users

Energy management firms (I'm including Demand Response and BIM in this grouping, along with "traditional" energy management firms like Hara) tend to think of the users of their systems as technically savvy. They design their applications for functionality and create UI using generic patterns like spreadsheets, lists, dashboards and grid views to get the data onto a screen.

But the reality is that when you deliver any application as SaaS or mobile, you immediately democratize the technology. Users tend to be far less technical and more relevantly, have far less time to devote to learning and using an application then developers anticipate. If you design an interface like a spreadsheet or a jet dashboard, users will find it too complex and will either not use or will use only when absolutely necessary. It hurts their pride and productivity because it does not aid in making sense of complex information. This translates to a low level of commitment and emotional engagement.

Instead you want to design your energy management application to replace generic data patterns with custom dynamic visualization based on user-validated use cases. Eliminate redundant information and provide predictable patterns of use that lets the user feel in charge. For "power" users, you can add additional complexity through modules or custom UI that lets them drill down. But keep the default design targeted on instant sophisticated use by anyone without the need for manuals or help desks.

Design for richness and interaction

Rich interactions let users manipulate data or objects using intuitive actions. Data manipulation and visualization is managed within panels of functionality that are integrated on a single screen. So for example, instead of entering numbers and clicking a submit button, a user drags a slider and the information updates dynamically. This kind of rich interaction is particularly important for energy management applications where the information can be complex and needs to be manipulated.

Richness improves the interest level and depth of commitment to the interaction the applications and features offer. User interact for longer periods and at a deeper level and are far more likely to share that interaction collaboratively with others.

Design brandable solutions

It may seem trivial, but to bind people to your product, you want to give them the ability to customize the look and feel of their administration, analysis and reporting screens. Personalization creates loyalty. A well designed SaaS energy management solution should allow for customizability both at the branding/co-banding level as well as customization of what panels or data fields are displayed.

The key is to design the UI so that brand and feature customization does not require separate code bases.

Build in radically simplified self-service across the entire SaaS customer life cycle

Your application is not just about managing energy. It is just as much about how people sign up for it, get support for it, provision it and even get billed for it - the entire customer life cycle. Designing the user experience for the customer life cycle is as important as designing the user experience of the core application. This approach is essential to reduce barriers to adoption as well as reduce costs.

Begin by systematically identifying all of the points in a SaaS application where the software or staff will touch the customer (e.g. early sales, marketing, demos, provisioning, configuration, billing, monitoring, renewals, support etc.). Then evaluate which of these touch points can and should be migrated online and be built into the SaaS application as self-service.

The optimal approach is to use automation and radically simplified self-service to do the tasks that would otherwise require support staff to service. User should be able to easily do these tasks on their own, right within the software without a human gatekeeper. When customer life cycle is implemented correctly in software, the cost of acquiring and supporting 1000 customers should be just marginally higher than for 1 customer.

Use mobile to build loyalty and provide additional functionality

Don't overlook and don't hold off on releasing a mobile app. But don't try to reproduce the functionality of the full desktop or SaaS application. Instead focus on companion functionality that specifically takes advantage of location, mobility, collaboration and always-on/always available functionality.

With the mobile app, focus less on designing for usability and focus more on designing for rapid learnability and discoverability. You want to deliver a compelling user experience that makes novices into experts with every interaction. This will be one of several factors that engenders "intimacy".

Embed analytics into SaaS and mobile apps

SaaS applications offer the ability to monitor when and how the software is being used, or perhaps more importantly, when and where the customer gets distracted, makes mistakes or stops using the software. Not only can you monitor how the customer uses the "primary" energy management application, but you can monitor where a user succeeds (i.e. good user experience) or fails (i.e. potential for dropout) in all of the other parts of the customer life cycle. Monitoring should also be built into companion mobile solutions.

This clearly enables you to learn how clients use energy management applications and therefore prioritize your R&D more effectively as to what capabilities to expand or where to refine the user experience.

I have only briefly touched on a few of the design principles for energy management/DR/BIM applications. Sustainability is really an exciting and rewarding area for Catalyst to work in. The integration of demand response, BIM and energy efficiency solutions has the potential to reduce demand for electricity by as much as 20 percent below projected peak levels. That will save big dollars and and go a long way to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But that potential is completely dependent on the design of user experience for both the control and customer applications.

Looking for more information?
If you have an existing sustainability application or are thinking about developing a companion mobile solution, contact us about a 21-day user experience assessment for sustainability applications.

Climate change is real and humans are indisputably a driver of the change. The magnitude of the problem is daunting and can feel overwhelming. This drives many people to focus on simple-to-grasp solutions.

For some the simple solution is to dispute the science and deny the problem exists. For others it is to fixate on fossil fuels as the cause and search for clean energy replacements as the solution.

Climate changes is more than a clean energy generation problem

The approach of denying the reality of climate change is not something I will comment on. But the approach that focuses on clean energy replacements is. While we do need clean energy, if we look at climate changes as nothing more than a clean energy generation problem we are just setting ourselves up for failure, at least in the short term.

Reality is that we don't have the technology or the political and economic will to replace fossil fuels and still maintain current levels of energy consumption. When you add in the rapidly growing energy demands of China, India and the developing world, the problem becomes even more acute. It would take unbelievable amounts of energy (clean or otherwise) to provide 8 billion people on the planet with the same energy consumed per person that is standard in the U.S. That amount of clean energy is just not going to happen in the next few decades (and maybe never). We need to look at other climate change energy adaptation measures as well.

Venture capital shifts clean technology strategy

I'm not alone in this assessment. Venture capitalists here in Silicon Valley are shifting their clean technology investment strategy. They're focusing less on new innovative clean energy technologies and more on ideas that could have a faster payoff but a smaller impact, such as software for monitoring and reducing energy consumption or demand response management systems that enable commercial and industrial clients (and consumers) to manage load and maintain economic control.

User experience design will determine the success of energy management and adaptation technologies

Now what does all of this have to do with user experience and application design? Even though control equipment and sophisticated application software determines how electricity demands are regulated, people still make the decisions on whether to invest in these systems and continue to use them.

That's where Catalyst comes in. We design the user experience and application interfaces for sustainability and energy management applications that make it intuitive, engaging, informative and compelling to use and audit these tools.

Our targets in sustainability currently focus on three areas:

• Energy management and reporting software to identify and prioritize energy management issues, operate critical energy endpoints at optimal efficiency levels and validate investment decisions
• Building information management (BIM) systems to design for and monitor energy efficiency/maintenance
• Demand response control systems that optimize visibility into and analysis of mission-critical energy information along with reporting interfaces that communicate to customers the need for load shedding, represent kilowatt reductions as actionable price information and verify compliance.

SaaS and mobile

We design climate adaptation applications for delivery as high-performance, scalable SaaS solutions. In addition we typically recommend and design companion mobile apps for in-the-field data collection and event-driven communication and collaboration.

Demand Response, Energy Management & BIM application design guidelines

In the upcoming part II of this post I will discuss some specific guidelines for designing Demand Response, BIM and Energy Management SaaS applications.

Recently a colleague asked me about our view on what is happening in the the world of sustainability and environmental / energy management. Catalyst has completed several SaaS and mobile projects in fuel management, carbon accounting and energy management so they wanted to get our thoughts on why the luster seems to have dulled in an industry that looked so bright and rapidly growing only a year ago.

Well first off, based on our experience, the sustainability, energy and environmental management industry is still very much alive. But it is no longer the high-profile media darling du jour.

Silicon Valley investors and media were attracted to the vision of dramatic shifts in clean technology solving previous intractable problems. Wind, solar, geothermal, algae-produced biofuels, laser-powered nuclear fusion, or Bloom Fuel Cells garnered the attention. The influx of government stimulus money did little to temper this.

New cleantech takes time to develop and root

The problem of course, is that these new technology solutions take time to develop, time to test and then even more time to take root and become widespread outside of niche environments. Even then there is an uphill battle to replace incumbent solutions (observe how electric cars are faring in the face of higher mileage standards from internal combustions engines).

Applications that can be used today

Less glamorous sustainability solutions - like using SaaS and cloud applications to reduce the complexity (and thus resource use) of the supply chain - do not get the hype or coverage. But SaaS solutions that use web and mobile applications to help optimize and manage existing energy and waste/resource management technology, continue to advance at a steady pace.

In the short term (and I suspect the long term as well), the sustainability firms that will have the greatest impact and the best chances for economic survival are those that use software applications to enable companies/individuals to plan and manage their own response to reach energy efficiency and emissions goals. This will include SaaS apps that help companies pinpoint opportunities for cost-effective energy efficiency improvements, as well as mobile apps for in-field response and management.

With energy management apps, design is not subjective. There is clearly measurable ROI

Demand Response is one example of this type of solution. Rather than build new solar power plants, develop a new smart grid, or turn trash into electricity, Demand Response gives customers favorable electricity prices in return for reduced usage (e.g. dimming lights or adjusting air-conditioning) during peak demand periods. EnerNOC is one company in the U.S. supplying this service (full disclosure, they are not a client). EnerNOC does not provide some revolutionary technology. Instead, they tap existing IT and present it in a way that make it easer for companies or individuals to monitor and manage energy usage in order to impact the bottom line.

EnerNOC represents a model for the kind of energy management clients that interest us. With many software applications, development executives are accustomed to thinking that the design of the application user experience is subjective. But with energy management the issues of design and application flow are not a matter of opinion. The design translates directly to measurable ROI-able observation and behaviors. The more effective and better designed/validated the user experience, the greater the participation and resulting energy management and savings.

Sustainability is one of Catalyst Resources primary areas of practice (along with Financial Services and Biotech/Healthcare.) We design rich internet interfaces, SaaS applications, mobile apps and instrument control UI for environmental and energy optimization solutions - a.k.a. sustainability.

Organizations increasingly recognize that sustainability will be critical to the future success of their business. But moving to sustainability can be disruptive and managers are likely to confront organizational rigidities as they try to implement initiatives. It is therefore essential to identify and expose the core values that sustainability offers to the user and to the organization.

"Doing the right thing for the planet" is laudable, but from a business perspective there needs to be other monetary, social and legal drivers to motivate action. Addressing these drivers is what will make sustainability initiatives succeed over the long term.

What are the some of the drivers behind organizational sustainability initiatives?

Each organization will have a unique set of business factors that drive their sustainability initiatives. When we design applications and application UI, much of our early work is to understand and design to expose these key drivers. We then anchor functionality reflecting these drivers, right in the primary RIA workspace. This makes the sustainability application (typically SaaS) inherently engaging and tuned for the real work.

Listed here are several of the common drivers we have identified with our clients that are undertaking sustainability initiatives:

• Financial ROI
  • Decreasing expenditures by improving energy efficiency and recycling materials
  • Increasing supply chain efficiency & connectedness (e.g. fewer sources, integration and collaboration with suppliers, shippers, partners)
  • Using location intelligence (GIS) for things like vehicle re-routing to reduce gas consumption, or optimizing locations for warehouse/distribution centers
  • Using more efficient transport modes/vehicles, use video/tele-conferencing when appropriate
  • Reducing packaging
  • Green procurement and near sourcing
• Government compliance / impending tighter regulation
• Decreasing risk
• Improving investor relations and pricing sustainability into long-term valuations
• Increase brand value as a market leader and innovator
• Attract customers/consumers who care about going green
• Achieving corporate responsibility agenda
• Environmental stewardship (people really do care!)

Most organizations identify and respond to multiple drivers. Our job at Catalyst to make it efficient and engaging for managers or teams to assess the risks/costs of resource consumption related to these drivers, identify sustainability initiatives and allocate capital, collect and manage data, manage the execution and track the progress of sustainability capital projects, run ROI/cost-benefit analyses and provide the required internal and external reporting.

This year Catalyst has seen a significant shift in areas of practice and the kinds of applications and interfaces we are engaged to develop. Part of this reflects changes in our own areas of interest, in particular, our work to support and develop sustainability initiatives. But I believe the shifts area reflective a larger move in the industry itself.

Compared to the last several years we have seen dramatic growth in the demand for application design services in sustainability and health care. There has also been continued growth in specific delivery styles of applications, such as SaaS and RIAs.  Desktop apps growth is relatively stable and flat, except in the area of health care, where this is an uptick in growth.  None of this is too surprising.

More interesting has been a rapid surge in interest for mobile application and gesture based interface design, as well as an increase in the requests for instrument control interfaces (perhaps reflecting the growth in embedded processors and remote monitoring).

For my own conceptual understanding of these trends I created color-coded matrix that shows the high growth areas relative to the lower growth areas.  It presents a heatmap-style view of application design trends with red representing hot areas and blue representing cool areas.

As I've written before, I have become very active in the area of energy and environmental optimization - aka sustainability. I've been collaborating with several individuals, VCs and tech firms in Silicon Valley, working to define and lead sustainability efforts.

My interest in sustainability is multi-faceted, reflecting my own diverse range of interests:

• As an Environmentalist: Developing solutions to our energy and resource needs that does not adversely affect the future of the planet and of my children is of paramount importance.
• As a Technophile: The hardware/software developments behind sustainability are some of the most technically interesting and socially relevant developments going on today.
• As a Businessman: As an entrepreneur, I recognize the enormous business opportunity offered by sustainability development and implementation. Eco-efficiency and creating low carbon-products is already a multi-billion dollar industry and will only continue to grow and expand.
• As a SaaS Application Designer: It is clear to me, that software to monitor, manage and monetize energy and resource use, whether at the consumer/individual level or at the corporate level will be provided as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The design of these applications - everything from signup to functionality to billing to support to visual branding to reporting - all aspects of the entire customer life cycle, will be critical to success.
• As a User Experience Designer: As someone with a keen interest in how to design user experiences that both motivate and facilitate user performance, sustainability presents an exciting challenge. Sustainability solutions that require user interaction including carbon accounting, tracking and capital investments, will be applied only in so far as they are meaningful, intuitive to use, and synergize with existing conceptual models and business processes.

While there are certainly more perspectives I can list, suffice it to say that I have many motivations driving me to take a lead in the field of sustainability.

The Rubric of Sustainability

One of the challenges when discussing sustainability, has been to find a concise way to describe and organize the diversity of services and the potential $$s that fall under the rubric of sustainability.

I've come up with a simple framework for classifying various sustainability efforts and services - a kind of Sustainability System of Record:

1. Production - Technologies devoted to creating carbon-neutral energy or reducing greenhouse gas emissions and waste production.
2. Distribution - Technologies devoted to distributing energy and resources efficiently from production source to consumption source.
3. Optimization - A broad category describing the initiatives an orgainzation or individual takes to optimize the energy and resources consumed and expended.
4. Output - The results of applying the optimization efforts.

Below I have an off-the-top-of-my-head list of what kinds of products and services fall into each category. I will be expanding and refining this list further in the next few blog posts. In addition to classifying more of the market services, I also want to try to add in estimates for investment dollars, companies involved, and even identify where there is a need for software solutions and user experience design.

As you can see, this is really just a quick first pass, but I am hoping through reader comments and feedback to be able to refine this into a useful resource.

Production	Distribution	Optimization	Output
Wind Solar Wave Tidal Biofuels Fuel cells Synfuel Energy efficient materials (glass, drywall, cement) Carbon sequestration Transportation (including electric vehicles, advanced batteries, fuel cells)	Grid management Battery technology Fuel fleet Mgt	Smart metering Carbon monitoring Sustainability ROI modeling & tracking Residential energy Mgt Facilities energy & waste tracking Carbon accounting Environmental consultancies Thermal Mgt Environmental disclosure and reporting Supply chain collaboration & tracking	Compliance reporting Carbon trading Carbon offsets Nuclear waste Waste water Compost & recyling CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) reporting for brand value

Like everyone, I want to believe that cutting-edge Cleantech will provide the solution to most or all of our environmental and energy problems.  Whether it’s wind, solar,  geothermal, algae-produced biofuels, laser-powered nuclear fusion, or something even more exotic, most efforts to move the world to a low-carbon, low-resource economy view the sustainability challenge in technological terms.  Much of the dollars are flowing this way as well.

But I am increasingly skeptical.  Notwithstanding the closing scene of 1985’s “Back to the Future,” in which Doc Brown returns from the future and refuels his time-traveling DeLorean with a banana peel, beer can and other garbage, for us in the present, a universal power source that consumes our waste and garbage and turns it into clean energy to power our electrical grid and transportation needs, simply does not exist.

Moreover, even with technological breakthroughs,  Cleantech will struggle to compete head-on against incumbents in established markets. It will take time to take root and become widespread outside of niche environments. But time is one luxury we are lacking if we are going to mitigate climate change.

Sustainability as a parallel track to Cleantech

So I see the need for a parallel sustainability track focused on using software and hardware to optimize and manage existing energy and waste/resource management technology. This may not be as “glamorous” as the Cleantech vision of cheap, inexhaustible, carbon-neutral power, but it is likely far more efficacious in the short term, and completely transferable to any new tech in the long term.

As I’ve written previously, companies need to reduce their resource use and waste production in order to:  lower costs across internal operations and their supply chain; meet regulations; and document their sustainability efforts to an increasingly aware consumer.  This requires investment in and development of web applications (specifically SaaS solutions) in order to track, manage, and determine ROI of energy/resource optimization actions.

Innovating the user experience of sustainability

In contrast to Cleantech, the challenge to successfully implementing SaaS-based sustainability solutions is less about designing new technology and more about designing new ways to motivate behavior.  For sustainability SaaS to succeed we need to innovate with user experience. The basic functionality of monitoring and tracking resource use does not really change, but the meaning of the application and the way the user interacts with the application, must be unique and valuable.

Examples of user experience changing the meaning of the mundane abound.  15 years ago, organic food was associated with co-ops and lower incomes.  Along came Whole Foods which changed the experience of shopping organic. The basic product stayed the same, but the meaning and value of the product changed.

The iPod is, of course, a classic example of user experience changing meaning. The iPod was not just an MP3 storage device, it offered a seamless experience for finding, buying, organizing, sharing and listening to music through an intuitive, rich interface.

Design Sustainability SaaS RIAs to be more than record management

As we design SaaS sustainability applications, we need to design the same shift in meaning.  We need to identify propositions so compelling that the customers/business could not have possibly asked for them (user-centered design be damned). This kind of innovation is “push” not “pull” and is based on compelling vision, Rich Internet Application (RIA) design, and the ability to seek inspiration outside of current application.