Renewable energy convergence support

The problem

At the time, REMS was organized primarily around the programme's institutional requirements. The screens that local-government staff and installation engineers needed for their daily work were not adequately provided. Having the information a programme requires did not, by itself, give its users a way to act on that information and complete their next task.

Field engineers needed to find their assigned sites, understand the work to be done, and move through equipment connection and recording the installation. I made that installer journey the concrete design scope. The wider problem concerned both local-government and field users; the deliverable shown here is the mobile prototype for field installers.

How I approached it

I reviewed the specification with internal stakeholders and organized the actions an installer needed to perform. Finding a site, connecting the remote telemetry unit, recording work photos and submitting the installation record became one sequence, with the information and next action made visible at each stage.

I treated the site list as the starting point for finding the work that needed attention. Name and address search, region filters and work categories narrowed the selection. Separate assigned-work and installation-record views let the installer inspect upcoming tasks and existing records for their different purposes.

I connected the journey into a prototype that could be used on a phone. The specification and running screens could then be reviewed together to examine whether a relevant site could be found, whether the current stage and next action were understandable, and whether the recording sequence held together.

Questions the field-work screens needed to answer

The detailed interactions followed the questions an installer would need to answer while working.

• How far have I progressed? Completed and current stages follow a consistent visual rule so the next step can be understood.
• What needs doing at this site? The work list shows task categories and status, while the installation-record view keeps its own status information.
• How do I find sites in another area? Alongside narrowing the region selection, an All option provides a way to clear it and browse again.

I recorded these decisions and their reasoning for the developer handoff. That made it possible to share how the screens should respond when work status or a user's selection changed, alongside their visual composition.

Reading the accumulated records as a status view

Each record an installer submits from a site is one piece of work. Together they become the numbers that say how far the programme has progressed. The capacity-status screen in the member-services menu is where those numbers are read. I organized it around three questions on one screen. How much was added this month is answered by the monthly bar chart, how much so far by the cumulative-capacity and latest-month tiles, and where it concentrates by the regional capacity grid.

The central decision in the chart is the toggle between by-source and total capacity. The convergence programme installs several kinds of equipment together, so whoever reads the status needs to alternate between which source drove the increase and how large the whole is. Rather than two separate screens, the same bars either stack or merge. The year and region filters sit on the same card so that changing the conditions does not change how the chart is read.

The outcome

The installer workflow missing from the existing REMS experience took shape as a mobile prototype, from finding a site to submitting a work record. Stakeholders and developers could examine the installer's next actions and working sequence on the same screens. The deliverable demonstrated a direction for translating programme requirements into the interfaces people need to do their work.