Building Dashboards: Considerations for Creation
By Amy Wang
Dashboards provide streamlined platforms to display potentially complex information to a wide audience. For our project, we’re creating dashboards that display energy data in a way that can hopefully increase the proenvironmental behavior of those who view the dashboard. To accomplish this, there are many factors to consider– data visualization, user experience, and choice architecture. The dashboard considerations discussed here are in the context of an energy dashboard (web or kiosk) that displays energy usage data with the goal of increasing proenvironmental and cost-saving behavior.
What makes a good dashboard?
A good dashboard displays data relevant to the audience and doesn’t show more than is needed; showing consumers power usage is probably relevant, but displaying the voltage or current data is probably not. Hence, dashboards should present important information and not be cluttered with information that is unimportant. A good dashboard is also simple to navigate and allows for easy user engagement. This means that the dashboard’s displays are refreshed appropriately (energy usage data in real-time) and the user should be able to find the data that they want with minimal effort; and example can be found here and here.
How can dashboards affect behavior?
There is already a notable gap between proenvironmental attitudes and behavior, with many psychological barriers that hinder behavior change [1]. Research shows that descriptive social normative messages beat messages focused on environmental, societal, or financial benefits in garnering behavior change; people were most likely to conserve when shown that their peers were doing so [2]. The presence of an injective message to call out good behavior lowers the boomerang effect, which is when people who are doing better than their peers decrease the desired behavior. Also, more people are motivated by fear of loss than hope of gain [2]. So what do these findings mean for a dashboard?
Unfortunately, there is no set formula for concocting a dashboard that optimizes the proenvironmental behavior of its audience. This is a good opportunity to implement what methods we know are effective for behavior change and turn our work into a research opportunity. This means gearing the energy data towards social messages, perhaps comparing subgroup usage to the larger aggregate energy use to encourage conservation, using loss language, and incorporating some sort of injunctive message in the dashboard.
How can one build a dashboard?
There are a few options for creating an energy dashboard; many of which include having a third party build a system based on a prepackaged set of dashboard widgets. Alternatively, you can build a custom solution for your problem. This involves managing a number of components: data to display, a platform for the dashboard, a data visualization method, and a way for the visualization method to access the data.
The work that I have been doing has involved all of these components. I am getting energy use data from the Duke Smart Home, and my goal is to create an online dashboard to display the data. The data are collected by electric power sensors and stored in a MySQL database that reads the information in real-time, allowing once-per-second data to be collected. To visualize the data, the MySQL database is queried by a PHP script that reads the information into a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) file, which is a specific data format. Then with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the JSON file is read and visualized using D3 (Data Driven Documents), a JavaScript library. With a server, this allows the creation of a dashboard accessible via the Internet that displays the energy use information of the Smart Home.
Possible development paths forward for this web dashboard for the Smart Home may include a mobile application that allows people to monitor their energy usage easily with their phones or tablets. If users are motivated to check the dashboard, it could be a good way to provide feedback on what behaviors they could change to facilitate energy conservation. These behaviors could range from seeing the need to replace an appliance that uses too much energy to turning off lights as they leave the room if they see that the lights are on when they’re not in use. In buildings that our team will soon collect data from, like the new Environment Hall, the data may be presented in a way that compares usage between zones, possibly encouraging proenvironmental behavior.
Energy dashboards present great potential for affecting behavior, and I am learning more as I delve into their development– from technical skills like writing code for data visualization or database querying to social science as I read more into behavioral science and choice architecture. I’m excited to see this project continue and where it will take me!
Citations
[1] Behavioral dimensions of climate change
WIREs Clim Change 2011, 2:801–827. doi: 10.1002/wcc.143
[2] OPOWER: Energy efficiency through behavioral science and technology
Laskey and Kavazovic. DOI: 10.1145/1961678.1961687