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Eaton Power Xpert • Project Lead & UX Lead

 

About

This was a redesign of Eaton's Power Xpert software, used for facilities power management. This project was done jointly with Eaton and Carnegie Mellon.

Responsibilities:

  • Project Lead
  • Information architecture
  • Wireframes
  • Interaction design
  • User research and testing
UPS detail

Navigation

A large part of the redesign was involved in improving the app's navigation and information hierarchy. Devices can be grouped by location or electrical flow and alarms are shown in context.

tree

Gauges that Show History

Gauges are great for showing the current status, but don't show what happened 5 minutes ago. We created history gauges to give users feedback as to where a needle has been.

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Customization

In talking to users, we found out that every installation is different. We added widgets to the interface so that users could more easily customize readings from devices.

customizing

Displaying Alarms

Alarms can be grouped by location, device or time, allowing easier scanning of the list.

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Troubleshooting

The alarms page also has a timeline view so that users can see a patterns or cascades over time.

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Behind the Scenes

 
 

Before
Screenshots of the interface before the redesign. Navigation focused on IP based hierarchies, but we found that users tended to think in geographic terms or electrical flow.

Users in the context of their work
We conducted several contextual inquiries with facilities managers, electricians, electrical engineers and data center administrators. They're experts in their field, but usually not expert computer users.

Case Studies
We examined several case studies and reduced them down to tasks and goals to find similarities across various industries.

Participatory Mood board
We assembled over 60 printouts of non Eaton interfaces and asked users and developers to annotate and vote on their favorites.

 
 

Speeddating
We validated design ideas early and often by showing users various scenarios and incorprated their feedback.

Sketching Interactions
We produced sketches and wireframes describing various features and interactions. (this is just a small sample) We later narrowed these down - looking for the ideas that would provide the most value to users.

Usability Testing
We tested various navigational schemes with users via a clickable wireframe prototype.

Video Demo
This video demo shows off various features and workflows of the resulting prototype. (requires QuickTime)