Push vs. Pull - A look at EcoView Web 2.0

Last month we officially launched version 2.0 of EcoView Web – Commercial Edition, our primary web-based user interface for managing and monitoring EcoView Commercial product installations. Initial customer reviews have been mixed. Some think it is far too “techy” and therefore not user-friendly and others think it is absolutely awesome. I can sympathize with those that find the UI to be too engineering-oriented since for many facilities managers and system operators this is their first encounter with an EMS user interface at all. In these cases parallels inevitably get drawn between EcoView Web 2.0 and much simpler web-based applications such as Gmail, etc.  The simple fact here is that flexibility nearly always breeds complexity and EcoView Web 2.0 is no exception to the rule. 

One aspect of EcoView Web 2.0 that was not very well supported in the version 1.0 is the ability to configure individual sites to automatically generate emails about issues rather than requiring a user to go looking for a problem by viewing graphs, etc. This was accomplished by providing user-configurable alerts based on pretty much any available data point as well as nearly limitless control over what points are controlled by schedule operations. The intent was to allow a user to essentially “wire up” a site to let him or her know if any point value ventures outside of a desired range. Even the acceptable range value itself can change during the day through the use of the new, highly flexible scheduler.

This “push vs. pull” approach was a major part of the original design requirements for version 2.0 of EcoView Web.  Of course that is not to say that we skipped improvements to the “pull” capabilities of the application either. We added many new graph output types to enable performance visualization based on temperature, energy consumption and equipment run times. Even here, however, the intent was to provide these tools to not only assist with identifying problems to but also to help determine alert (i.e. “push”) trigger points and expected operating parameters. 

All of this being said, we are certainly sensitive to making EcoView Web easier to use and more intuitive. It is clear that there is room for improvement in making alert rules and schedules in particular simpler to visualize and interact with. We also need to provide more template options, where specific configurations can more easily be applied to multiple devices and sites. These considerations are currently being fed into the design phase for EcoView Web 3.0 and our marketing group is going to be working with customers and end-users over the next month or so to get feedback on what works and what doesn’t in terms of the UI design.  We are also planning to introduce an EcoView Web 3.0 technology preview web site where select customers can use and provide feedback on under-development design features to insure that user input is considered while still under development rather than after we are done.