Applying User Experience (UX) Principles to Net Zero Energy Buildings

People spend the majority of their day inside a building but remain unaware of the complex inner workings shaping their indoor environment. Energy dashboards simplify thousands of building data points to allow users to improve and understand the performance of their buildings. Traditionally, energy dashboards have had a more limited role in facility management in terms of monitoring performance, detecting sensor malfunctions, and identifying broken equipment. Increasingly, energy dashboards are developed to actively manage and optimize the performance of sophisticated net zero energy buildings (NZEBs). This research applied User Experience (UX) principles to improve an energy dashboard for a prototype net zero energy building and evaluated user’s ability to understand and interpret the information. The research found statistical significance that UX increases a user’s ability to identify building performance metrics. Understanding the user’s skill level is one of biggest challenges in energy dashboard design. This study designed a new categorical testing method to help design the layout of the graphic interface for an energy dashboard that matches the expectations and needs of diverse users.