This story starts in Japan, where the United Nations body for climate reporting, the TFI, is based. Countries all over the world report yearly emissions to the UN. It’s like a financial report but for greenhouse gases. Countries determine their emissions and removals of greenhouse gases and send the final balance sheet to the UN.
This sounds easy and straightforward, but in fact it’s a highly complicated process. There are tools to help, but most are old. While an enormous amount of experience and thought went into the development of existing tools, they haven’t been designed with end users in mind.
This is where Seaspray Labs comes into play. We are currently working on a web-based app for greenhouse gas inventories. Like most inventory tools it is based on the guidelines developed by the TFI. Here are our design questions:
- How can we simplify the inventory process?
- How can we help and guide users through the process?
Here are three steps we are taking to tackle this:
Step 1: Understand the inventory process. When designing interfaces, this step is often skipped, even though it’s so important. How can designers simplify a process if they don’t have an in-depth understanding of it? This step includes user research to see how current users are using existing tools. During user interviews we learned how inventory compilers approach their inventories, and we heard about their struggles with existing tools. In the context of a greenhouse gas inventory, this step also includes understanding climate science and the guidelines for climate reporting from the TFI.
Step 2: Design a simplified workflow. The majority of our users are newcomers. How can we make the user interface straightforward for them? We identify the actions for a simple inventory every step of the way and hide all other functions. This way, we don’t overload newcomers with information that doesn’t apply to them.
Step 3: Architect the tool with flexibility. While the majority of our users are newcomers, we also have many expert users. They have more complex datasets and need more sophisticated estimation methods. We need to allow for flexibility. Functions and actions for expert users, such as importing massive data sets, are part of the design to address user needs from basic to extremely sophisticated.
What do I like most about designing tools for climate reporting? There are existing tools out there. They are not easy to use, but a lot of experience and thought went into their development. It’s a fun challenge to transform them into intuitive, easy to use apps. And hopefully they can help to make climate reporting easier and more accurate.
