Round 3 Regroup: Prototypes

Our first prototype idea was dots.  A breaker room would have a color associated with it, and each light or room would have a dot with the same color placed on it so that workers could easily find the breaker room associated with a light.  Also, we noticed that while doing a hard job, such as changing the lights on top of Hoover Tower, some workers might immortalize their job by writing their name in an inconspicuous location, so we could use the dots for that, too -- a person could write their initials on a dot before putting it on the light.  We didn't go forward with this because it would require an indoor map to work well, and an indoor map would also solve much of the issues that dots would solve.

Our second prototype was a checklist.  Some of the issues that we observed were due to people forgetting things or miscommunicating.  For instance, in one job, S scouted everything out, but J had to come in and spend hours finding the breaker room even though some of that work had already been done.  Also, M could have brought a key from the electric shop, but instead he had to get it from another building.  This idea didn't pan out with our users because they already had something similar to it -- the problem was usage.  We didn't have time to do more interviews to figure out why it wasn't being used successfully.

Our third prototype was outdoor maps.  We interviewed Stanford's mapping department, and we found that a lot of the work in making an outdoor map of the lights (as seen below) was done by electric shop people, but that they still had to wait for the mapping department to put it all together.  That would be a lot easier if the electric shop people could make the maps themselves.  We re-made part of the outdoor map on Google Maps to show how they could do the maps without relying on any external entities.

Our final prototype was indoor maps associating each light with a breaker room.  We have the breaker rooms color coded so that they're easy to find, and we label each room with the breaker room that controls it.

The electric shop was excited about our two mapping prototypes!

Final Prototype: Indoor Maps

Prototype 2: Dots

Prototype 3: Google Maps for Outdoor Maps