Organizational Sustainability

Final Presentation

Team Members Andrew Gillespie, Bhavana Gupta, John Horstman, Tongbo Huang, 

Jared Pryor

Project Overview

Clean Air-Cool Planet (CACP) is the leading organization dedicated solely to finding and promoting solutions to global warming:

• CACP partners with companies, campuses, communities and science centers to help reduce their carbon emissions.

• CACP helps their partners, constituents, regional opinion leaders, and stakeholders understand the impacts of global warming and its best available solutions, through comprehensive outreach efforts celebrating commitment, innovation, and success in climate action.

• CACP proposes and recommends the implementation of effective policy solutions aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the state, regional and national levels.

What is CLEAN AIR-COOL PLANET?

The Campus Carbon Calculator (CCC) measures campus emissions and can be used to help create a climate action plan, analyzing viable long-term strategies to reduce a campus’s carbon footprint:

• Provided as a free resource as a part of CACP's Campus Climate Action Toolkit.• Currently in use at more than 1200 campuses across the country, the calculator

is designed to be compatible with any type of school — from a technical community college to a 4-year university.

• The Calculator is also the “tool of record” for most of the 600 signatories to the American Colleges and University Presidents Climate Commitment, a voluntary agreement to move toward campus “climate neutrality.”

What is the CAMPUS CARBON CALCULATOR?

The CAMPUS CARBON CALCULATOR tool takes the form of a Macro-enabled Excel Spreadsheet:

The CAMPUS CARBON CALCULATOR tool takes the form of a Macro-enabled Excel Spreadsheet:

The CAMPUS CARBON CALCULATOR tool takes the form of a Macro-enabled Excel Spreadsheet:

The CAMPUS CARBON CALCULATOR tool takes the form of a Macro-enabled Excel Spreadsheet:

Professor Mankoff and her colleagues developed StepGreen, a website that promotes changes in energy consumption through personalized information in the form of social influences (e.g., persuasion by peers) and competitive interaction with other groups who are similarly trying to save energy. StepGreen.org encourages and assists individuals in reducing their ecological footprints, and/or the amount of natural resources he/she uses.

Our Faculty Advisors: Jen Mankoff

Professor Matthews is the Research Director of the Green Design Institute and a faculty member in the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering & Public Policy at CMU. His research and consulting interests are in the areas of using the Internet to facilitate the environmental life cycle assessment of products and processes, carbon footprinting, green supply chain management, and the energy and environmental impacts of transport, and information infrastructure.

Our Faculty Advisors: H. Scott Matthews

Focus For Campus Carbon Calculator Tool

We came up with 3 Foci, decided on 1:

1. Understand issues with the existing carbon footprint calculation tool

2. Understand the spreadsheet user's work flow and identify potential issues

3. Understand how data in the existing tool relates to data in other footprint calculators

Our Use of HCI Methods

• Our group found the development of our foci to be a challenge because of our unfamiliarity with the domain.

• Our focus switched back and forth between different applications a couple of times.

• After speaking with CMU's Facilities Management Services (FMS) environmental coordinator, we understood more about the CCC work flow and we were able to narrow down our potential CI targets.

• We used feedback from our stakeholders to help narrow down our focus, and confirm that we were on the right track.

Focus Setting / Affinity Diagram:

• CI reveals the work flow across multiple users.• Since each university had a different process for filling out the

CCC Tool, we saw some very different data points from our CI users.

• All of our CIs were performed on users that had already completed the CCC tool for the most recent year, so we had to study their workflow retrospectively.

• The CI participants provided a good retrospective account because they had easy access to their copies of the CCC and to their appropriate notes.

• We dealt with a couple of CI “false alarms” where we scheduled a CI with users who did not actually use the CCC tool, and this wasn’t properly communicated to us.

Contextual Inquiry (CI):

Contextual Design:• Consolidation led to potential design ideas.• It was good that we didn’t decide to do every single model, but chose to only

create the models which were a good fit for our project and for the CIs that we had performed.

• The CD process required more time and effort than our group initially anticipated in order to reach a consensus that everyone was comfortable with.

• Creating models from the data of the CIs we conducted early on provided us with a blueprint of what to do and of what not to do for our subsequent CIs.

• Consolidation revealed a large number of breakdowns directly related to the CCC tool.

• The Persona roles we developed were obvious after looking at the consolidated flow model.

• Our stakeholders expressed excitement about the idea of creating good representations of the typical users of the Campus Carbon Calculator.

• Persona 1: Gladys, FMS Supervisor• Persona 2: Arturo, Data Entry Worker & Grad Student

Personas:

• Decided to perform a Think-Aloud on our current tool in order to collect more data for our design solutions.

• Found some breakdowns that didn't come up in CIs. • Identified problems that didn’t come up in CIs:

o Enabled us to watch how long it can take a user to scroll through the tabs and columns, even when the user is familiar with the data to enter

o Observed how frequently users have to zoom in & outo The vastness of the CCC Tool created long search times for

particular goals

Think-Alouds:

• Built models of the tasks evaluated in the think-alouds.• This was the fastest method we performed all semester.  It only

took about 2-3 hours to build the models & calculate the estimated task completion time.

• There was much less overhead involved since we didn't have to hunt down volunteer test subjects or work around their schedules.

• Models provided quantitative measures of performance times.

CogTool (KLM):

Design Solutions

• The user has to do a lot of horizontal scrolling within each tab • Evidence: Consolidated Flow Model, UARs from think-alouds, CogTool models

Rationale:

• Collapsible columns that hide unnecessary columns.• Displaying columns that are useful for the user and hiding other

columns that aren't.

Design solution:

• Improved navigation between spreadsheet sections  o A drop down menu would suffice in letting the user see all the different tab

options.o The sidebar frame design that shows the tab options vertically,

perhaps collapsible categories would work.

Design solution:

• User can’t remember all of the available tabs, and it takes a long time to scroll among them. In the tabbing, the graphical output data is given the same hierarchical status as the input spreadsheet fields.

• Evidence : Consolidated Flow Model

Rationale:

• System remembers the zoom percent last entered by the user and keeps it until user changes it.

• Find a heuristic or research about optimal zoom levels and use that to set the default zoom.

Design solution:

• User is always zooming in and zooming out.• Evidence: UARs from think-alouds

Rationale:

• Input & output units aren’t always consistent with what the user expects.

• Evidence: UARs for think-alouds, Consolidated Flow Model, Consolidated Cultural Model.

Rationale:

• Add a conversion feature, perhaps a warning or label to remind the user to add in the correct conversion

• Allow the user to choose the units when inputting data or when displaying output data.

Design solution:

• Add a place to record assumptions within the system, such as an additional spreadsheet tab (that is unless it's redesigned without tabs).

Design solution:

• Need to write assumptions / procedures when filling out the form in a separate document than the main CACP Carbon Calculator.

• Evidence: Consolidated Sequence Model, Consolidated Flow Model

Rationale:

• Give the tabs/sections better names – for example, change the name of “G_TotalEmissions" to "Graph_TotalEmissions” or “Graph: Total Carbon Emissions.”

Design solution:

• Tab (section) names aren’t clear. • Evidence: UARs from think-alouds

Rationale:

• Better facilities for user support o Online forum that connects CCC users, and gives them a chance to

ask questions and receive answers from the community (would be nice if the site could be monitored by the Clean Air Cool Planet organization).

o Include a directory of common or experienced users of the spreadsheet that are available to contact.

o Certain sections of the User Guide pdf could link directly to specific threads within the Community Forum so that a confused User could receive a larger range of related advice whenever they encounter problems

o Add direct links from the CACP Spreadsheet to the appropriate section in the User Guide (Add bookmarks to the User Guide, add an index).

Design solution:

• Users have trouble finding an easy way to get help for their questions • Evidence: Consolidated Flow Model.

continued... Design solution:

Rationale:

o Create online training modules which could provide basic training over the main functionality of the CACP Spreadsheet, and answers to common questions.

• Add a reference section to the user guide containing general guidelines for estimating data. Reference material for estimate guidelines can be collected from previous CACP tool users.

Design solution:

• The user has to perform a lot of estimation on the data that he/she has collected.

• Evidence: Consolidated Flow Model

Rationale:

• Add a reference section in the user guide to explain the data entry cells that users commonly find confusing.

Design solution:

• The user guide does not include guide to direct data to appropriate cell.• Evidence: UARs from think-alouds/Consolidated Flow Model

Rationale:

Conclusions and Recommendations

Choose your CI models effectively. • For our group, physical models provided very little value, so we

didn't spend time building them.• This freed up more time to spend on critical models (flow, cultural,

sequence).

Conclusions

Allocate plenty of time for consolidation and visioning. • Consolidation ended up taking us about 3 times as long as we

expected.• Consolidation meetings were eating into our remaining schedule.• There was a lot of debate about how the models should be

consolidated.

Conclusions

Well-designed think-aloud tasks lead to better data. • When reviewing the think-aloud recordings, we found ourselves

questioning whether or not our task details were too specific.

Conclusions

Over communicate with your test subjects. • There's no such thing as scheduling too far in advance.• Make absolutely sure you're speaking with the right person.• Call or email to confirm your upcoming meetings.• Line up extra test subjects if possible.

Conclusions

Questions??

Appendix

Consolidated Cultural Model:

Consolidated Flow Model:

Consolidated Sequence Model:Trigger: Project to create a report showing carbon footprint of university.Intent: Fill out CACP Tool for a particular fiscal year and generate report.

•Read CACP Tool User Manual to gain overall understanding.•Optionally check through the CACP Spreadsheet (such as the coefficients that are being used for calculations) to check for accuracy and that they make sense

• (BREAKDOWN): How can you verify that coefficients which seem weird are truly correct?

•Determine what data needs to be requested.•Contact Facilities Management Senior Administrators.•Get approval for project from Senior Administrator.•Senior Administrator for FM reaches out to Senior Officials of other Department. (Permission isn’t needed to communicate to contacts outside of the University)•Perform loop with each appropriate contact:

• Communicate a data request to appropriate resources• Wait until contact/resource responds with desired data.

• If the contact hasn’t responded, send more emails; eventually escalate to Senior Administrator if no one is responding (for contacts outside of the university, there may not be an appropriate procedure to communicate with the contact’s boss).

• (BREAKDOWN): Have to wait on others for data..

Consolidated Sequence Model (Cont):• Analyze data to determine if additional calculations need to be performed.

• If extra calculations are needed. Use extra spreadsheet to perform calculations.

• Go to the Internet (or appropriate resources) to retrieve additional info needed for calculations.

Trigger : Data not found.• Determine if assumptions need to be made for the data.

• If so, make sure to record these assumptions (they will be added to the final report.)

• (BREAKDOWN): Some data requires user to make assumptions in order to complete the spreadsheet.

• Determine if the data is appropriate to use for the report• If not, don’t include it into the spreadsheet.• (BREAKDOWN): Data given to me isn’t appropriate/doesn’t make

sense.• Enter in the finalized version of the data.

•Enter data into the spreadsheet from other sources (University Factbook, utility bills)•Transcribe information from the CACP spreadsheet to the report.•Supervisor presents final report to Facilities Management and to senior university officials.

continued... Persona: GladysGladys is the Sustainability Manager at Penn State. She is 42 years old and is passionate about environment and sustainable living. She did her undergard in Environmental Sciences and is a LEED certified associate. She is married and has one daughter. In her free time she likes to spend time with her daughter, tend her garden and take care of their pet dog, Snoopy. Her favorite color is blue.

• Having been at Penn State for 5.5 years, she extends the same enthusiasm for environment in her workplace. She has great relationships with her co-workers and they all enjoy the challenge of making Penn State carbon neutral and getting more “a lil more“ budget from the college board. Her office is in the basement of the Facilities building and this is her only complain with the workplace. She cannot keep plants in her office, as there is no sunlight in the basement.

• She uses the CACP tool because it is free and some of her colleagues at other colleges recommended it. Every year, it is her job to present he final carbon print report to the college board. Arturo was hired by Gladys to work on the CACP and for the more hands-on work of the tool. Also, she does not like working with Excel sheets and would rather collect data and supervise Arturo.

Persona: Gladys

Arthuro is a grad student at Penn State in Civil & Environmental Engg. Dept. He is 24 and did his undergrad in Civil Engineering from Georgia Tech. He is fascinated by bridges and that was one of the reasons he decided to study in proximity to Pittsburgh. Arthuro took up the part time job with Gladys to earn some extra money. He has been working on it since Aug 2010 and is now confident about using it. He finds it hard to take out time for the tool consistently every week since his classes started, and he is worried Gladys may not be happy about that.

Personas: Arturo

CogTool (KLM):

CogTool (KLM):

CogTool (KLM):

CogTool (KLM):