All work
Climate Tech
2023
Northbeam Ops
An operations dashboard that helps grid teams see, and trust, renewable forecasts.
Client
Northbeam Energy
Role
Senior Product Designer
Timeline
8 months
Services
Data Visualisation, UX, UI
−52%
time to resolve alerts
9 of 10
operators prefer it
1.4M
data points rendered live
01
The problem
02
Research
I spent two night shifts in a control room and ran a task analysis with eight operators.
Operators glanced at screens for under three seconds at a time.
Confidence in a forecast mattered as much as the forecast itself.
Alerts fired so often that people had stopped reading them.
03
Process
We designed for the glance: big numbers, one accent colour for “act now” and uncertainty bands drawn directly into every chart.
I prototyped with real historic data so operators could judge the design against days they remembered.
04
The solution
The new dashboard groups alerts by cause, shows forecast confidence as a shaded band and lets operators annotate events for the next shift.
Quiet by default
Most of the screen stays calm and grey. Colour only appears when a decision is needed.
05
Outcomes
Average time to resolve alerts fell by more than half, and nine of ten operators asked to keep the new dashboard after the trial.
The annotation feature, a late addition, turned out to be the most loved part of the release.