Wireframes

    We initially started by writing up a list of functions we thought our app should have / functions the existing npower app included and working from that. We initially narrowed down the list and omitted certain functions as we felt these were not necessary and in turn this lead to a cleaner, sleeker design. We be can to work from this new list of functions we wished our app to have creating our initial designs. We worked quite a lot on narrowing down the amount of pages we had included in the app as we felt that the fewer pages there were to navigate through, the more seamless the experience of using the app would be. To combat the number of pages, we decided to include some triple height pages where users could simply scroll down to access more information. We felt this would be successful as using a scrolling motion on a touch device is very natural so users would easily be able to navigate through the information. After omitting a lot of pages and functions we felt we had the right amount of information available to users and went on to design the initial layouts. At this stage we decided that our game was too simplistic and wouldn’t appeal to a very wide audience, so we decided to scrap the idea of basing our game around a ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ house and moved over to the idea of a game that would make the users more aware of their environmental impact through their energy usage and created two themes for our game, one of an iceberg which would either melt as the energy expenditure of the home went up, or would be come a stable environment with penguins living on it when the energy expenditure of the house being low. As the same with the other theme of a tree and grass growing or dying in relation to how much energy is being used in the home. We felt it would make users more aware of how much energy they were using and the environmental impact of this whist not really having to participate in the game at all and without any sort of real educational theme as we found people weren’t really too interested in educational games. We moved onto deciding which features would be used in the app and how they would be displayed on screen. We decided to use a few graphs to easily show users information about energy usage and bills etc. in a way everyone can understand through being clear and concise. We included a direct link to information about the ECO schemes npower offer and how to check your eligibility for these schemes, taking the form npower provide on their website and adding it into the app so all of the information users need is in one place, and users who might ordinarily not have known about the ECO schemes due to not visiting the power website will have the information they need right in font of them without the need to search for it alongside a direct link to apply. We added a section on ‘energy saving tips’ to alert users to how they could save money in the home, weighing up the costs against the savings as people aren’t likely to take up these tips when they only know the cost of putting them into place. By providing them with an amount they could potentially save, users will be more motivated to get involved. We also decided to add an extra page for prepayment customers as when asked, they said they didn’t know what sort of sum they were trying to pay off, how much was coming off each month and where they stood with the bill. With the added screen all of this information is included for those who are pre payment customers, as well as an option to top up their credit online as this has recently become possible for prepayment customers for the first time ever.

What we plan to include