Solwe

The task

The hackathon NASA Space Apps Challenge is an international competition with participants from all over the world. I participated with a team of a total of six girls in the Swedish conception arranged by HiQ. The task is to choose one of 28 challenges and come up with the best possible solution over a weekend. The challenge we chose was to create an application that handles NASA’s enormous amount of data and makes it easy to handle and interpret for everyday people who own solar panels and therefore could make use of it.

The process

The project began with research. We looked into current similar applications and services, but didn’t find any that matched our idea.

Target group

To gain understanding of the users we initially made a survey using Google Forms. It reached about 300 respondents that owned solar panels and therefore could be considered potential users. Two personas were then created to get a better idea of the user. We then created two scenarios in which situations the application would be useful for these personas.

To decide on the structure of the application we created a requirements specification that stated what the app should contain. We could then create a hierarchy of the different pages and the navigation, giving the team a good overview of what should exist on what page, as well as how they were connected.

The final result

The solution is a prototype of an application called SOLWE. The core of the idea is to create added value for solar panel owners through a user experience based on AI and personalization. The application gives the user sustainable recommendations based on the solar panel’s current production as well as a prognosis of expected production based on NASA’s weather data. It also allows for discovering flaws in the panel’s capacity and much more.