Lonely Pets, User-Centered Design, and Utility Demand-Side Management

Lonely Pets, User-Centered Design, and Utility Demand-Side Management, #energyefficiency

Recently I spoke at the 2012 E Source Utility Customer Experience Conference in Charlotte, where I was invited to talk about user-centered design and the role of ethnography in helping utilities design programs to more effectively reach their customers and change their energy use behaviors. This topic dovetails nicely with my webinar, “Strawberries and Wheat ,” which I delivered for the Yale Center for Business and the Environment two months back where I discussed utility branding practices and customer segmentation. In my E Source presentation, we look at examples from the high-tech world, like Apple, which design “with the user in mind.” User-centered design (UCD) and user-experience testing (UX) are both deeply embedded in the high tech sector, since the concepts emerged in Silicon Valley over 30 years ago. Since the 1970s, big think tanks like Xerox PARC and SRI have e...

Full article: http://aceee.org/blog/2012/04/lonely-pets-user-centered-d...