Solar Decathlon Project: Design

Overview
As mentioned in my last post, for this project we were given the task to design a mockup user interface for the home management system of Team Hawaii's Solar Decathlon house. Unlike the previous post, in this post I will go over the design aspect of the project. The overall approach we took was to design a system that anyone could simply pick up and use without much thought. As a result, we feel we have designed a pretty well rounded home management system that should cover most, if not all, bases.

Design
Like mentioned above, our goal was to design a system where the user doesn't have to put much thought into how it use it. We were trying to follow the Keep it simple, stupid! or KISS principle; this principle basically states that your design should be simple and straightforward. We tried to achieve this by designing a very basic and intuitive template and then used this template as a basis to design each of the pages for the home management system. The end result of our initial design, was a system that was pretty simple to understand and use:

After collaborating with my group members a few more times, we were able to come up with a final design that we felt was simple and very consistent throughout each of the pages. We went back and added a few finishing touches such as rounding corners, adjusting spacing, and aligning the pages with each other. Our last meeting was basically to polish our design and make sure all the pages were consistent with one another. The final design of the home management system can be found on our group's Google project hosting site. A few screenshots from our final design can be seen below:

As far as design, I actually learned some new things while designing the home management system. First, I learned that it's not such good practice to bombard the user with lots of data and charts. The second thing I learned was that it's important to put things in terms that the user will understand; don't use language that the average user won't understand. Finally, that it's better to put minimal information on a page than to make the user have to constantly scroll down.