Interface Design for Facility managers: Navigation and climate control of a familiar building

Interface Design for Facility managers: Navigation and climate control of a familiar building

Kruty, D.

De Ridder, H. (mentor)
Van der Helm, R.M. (mentor)
Van de Langkruis, A. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Design Engineering

Integrated Product Design

2013-09-20

The purpose of the project was to explore the possibilities of communicating the process of operating the humidity, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) hardware of a multi-levelled building through a software tool to facility managers, including those possessing domain technical knowledge and those who do not. The challenge was to find out the differences between their perceptions of the HVAC system and implement them in the design that satisfies both groups. One of the problems to be solved within this challenge was to create a consistent and clear way to communicate the effects of applying settings, in particular when they affect other areas in the building, above/below or within the same level. The project was proposed and conceived as visionary, exploring the possibilities and development direction in the future. The methods for research and design included card-sorting with open discussion of HVAC system functional connections, tests to discover the usability and preferences towards various spatial representations of the building and iterative design of the interface. It started from discussions and feedback on rough paper sketches, and the fidelity of the following prototypes was gradually increasing and including more and more specific solutions. The findings have shown that people without technical background perceive the HVAC system in terms of spaces, rather than hardware (they want to make the room colder, rather than change the air conditioning settings). This means that they think of applying a climate condition change to a room, rather than to an HVAC unit. The easiest way to orient in space was the top-view map, followed by floor plans in perspective. Several elements contributing to recognition of familiar spaces, such as colour coding of areas, name tags and wall rises were important for test subjects to orient well on the floor plans. Throughout the flow of the design process, various building representation concepts were tested, as well as approaches to performing settings and task flows. The findings were implemented in the design. Overall, the design was recognised as successful by final user test subjects. The system provides a framework for various task flows, which correspond the types of activities that facility managers perform during their work. The designed interface features a consistent manner of representing variously-sized buildings; a way to include a multitude of settings; possibility to extend the functionality to new types of controls; a clear overview of the current state of building settings. Final user testing brought up some specific elements of the interface which should receive more design effort, such as indications of the state of the settings on a lower level when the navigation tree is collapsed, the colour coding of the current settings in the graphical navigation area. The interface is suitable for use on a mobile tablet touchscreen device; smartphone use is not convenient and a modification of the proposed interface has to be developed in order to enable smartphone use.

HVAC
facility management

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ce9b38e8-44af-475f-9bab-3a565318b4c1

2014-09-20

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2013 Kruty, D.