RFC – powercuts.in design
Summers in most parts of India are hot, pretty damn hot. To top that, we have power cuts – and if recent statistics are to be believed, unplanned surprises far exceed planned power cuts.
To get a clearer picture of this situation and do something about it, a friend, Ajay Kumar, recently came up with a pretty thrilling idea… and executed it well. Thus, powercuts.in was born. Ajay requested me to help with the design task and I came up with the following homepage design for powercuts.in.
This post is a request-for-comments on that new design as we intend to keep this process fairly open and want everyone to collaborate in the development of the website which is built for the people of India dealing with torturous power cut situations in summers.
Please find the first draft of the homepage design below. If you find this to be an interesting idea, you are invited to make your voice heard – please post your constructive comments and criticism on this post.
powercuts.in homepage design
Tags: design, draft, powercuts.in, rfc
This looks nice!
From aesthetic perspective, I like the clean design, and the color combination.
From product / usability perspective, see if the following inputs help in any way:
1. Header Message: Would be much better for the masses if instead of writing the message only in Hindi and English, you could make a mashup of small sentences in various Indian languages, and use them in the header. Just conveying the basic thought (like you’ve done in Hindi) should do.
2. Logo: The logo didn’t convey the “report” or “cuts” part to me. :-)
3. Benefit: Can you convey why users should report outages to the site? What’s the benefit to the end-user? If this is conveyed in a nifty manner, it could change the way people perceive the initiative.
4. As a first-time user, I would be a lot more inclined to report any ongoing power outage if you include the first few fields (“Select Location, and Time of outage, and click on proceed”) to report on the right side itself, rather than making me click on a link to get to the form. This way you get people initiated with the reporting on main page itself.
And all in all, great effort! :-)
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Manish
Thanks for your valuable input Manish! :)
1. Your suggestion would definitely make it more helpful for the masses that don’t speak/read Hindi/English. But a message/mashup in all available languages, I think, would clutter the header quite a bit, which I wanted to avoid. However, perhaps a translation of the main message (localisation) could be a nice addition there. We’ll look into that as soon as the basic design structure is up. ( @Ajay: What do you think? :)
2. I agree, a logo can be a lot more sophisticated. However, since we wanted that instantly, my main target there was to achieve the basic characteristics it must essentially have within the time constraints:
(a) should be unique
(b) should be a relevant symbol for the cause
(c) should have a recall value
(d) grows on the user along with the website itself and all related activities
(e) shouldn’t be annoying or objectionable in appearance, of course :D
It’s true that it doesn’t hold a direct symbolic reference to “reports” or “cuts”, but only to “power” and “electricity” – and we’d like to hear more about how it does in terms of recall value and being a unique symbol. Does it remind you of something else? Does it look ugly? Does it look like a electric tower? I think, answers to those would be pretty helpful pointers. Also, do you think it wouldn’t fulfill any of the 5 characteristics listed on this page – http://www.davidairey.com/what-makes-a-good-logo/ , if yes, please do elaborate? :)
3. Thanks again for this very important suggestion. I agree with you on this. Will discuss this with Ajay – I think I already have some ideas on how to add in that important piece of info.
4. That again adds to the site’s user-friendliness. I think, I’d put this on top of todo list for the second iteration of changes. :)
Thank you very much for your appreciation and very valuable analysis and suggestions.
@Manish,
I was going to put this in the code where based on visitors IP, the website’s header tagline would change to the state’s language. :o)
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Great point of view…
You can find about it more extensively here……
You should also sell small cheap devices that tweet everytime there is a powercut that can be installed on the local electric pole.. communities would pitch in to get these installed. Couple of years back, people on our block pitched in to get streetlights installed (the govt was not fixing the old/broken lights).
Also the size of the dots on the map should also change in size when zoomed in/out (zooming out to see the whole map causes the whole country to be covered in a cluster of dots)
I’m impressed. What would it take to create similar sites in countries adjacent to India?
i am praveen pandey from siwan bihar many city in bihar problem electricity he give me 2 hours in whole day .our bihar govt share in central pool 1900 mw but he give me 700-900 mw .and bihar govt give electricity cota to railways and nepal govt and give patna 400 m.w and last distribute all town in bihar and i rechage mobile and inverter excide tubular batary our cm nitish working this problem he use solar system in c.m house.my email id is praveen.pandey01@gmail.com.reply me
Dear Site Admin,
This is a great initiative indeed and must be congratulated in no feeble terms.People are more than happy if they feel that they can contribute to the well being of the society.
My suggestions are :
1. Put an instant catch logo depicting how the people can contribute , because not everyone goes through the pain of reading all text.
For ex. Create a Logo for FB+Twitter+SMS+any other way to contribute.
2. Make the Map API as fast as possible to load.
3. The Power Trends and tweets should be realtime.
4. Create a FB group for more awareness and print media if possible.
5. Finally have a cup of Coffee and relax…You have start a great concept indeed. ! :-)
With Thanks.
Alok Jain
New Delhi
Twitter handle @alokjain_
@Alok, thanks much for your kind words and suggestions.
We are already working on design changes based on received feedback so far.
An FB group already exists, you may join and contribute to the cause as well as keep track of the latest news about powercuts.in here: http://www.facebook.com/PowerCutsInIndia :)
Thanks!
@JohnH Thanks for your kind words. I am sure a few volunteers (or volunteering organisations) with enough motivation to bring about a positive social change using the technology at hand can get the ball rolling with similar initiatives in other countries as well.
Short suggestion. Is it possible to integrate powercuts.in with location based services like Foursquare and Google Latitude. Basically then, the lat-long is already mapped and even the building and I just need to enter information like duration of the power cut etc.,
Not sure if you have already implemented it.
Ah yes, that would be a great feature indeed! I’ll convey your suggestion to the concerned people for sure, however, since I am not involved with the backend development, I am not aware whether something like this is planned or already implemented.
One problem I see is that a very small fraction of our population that actually puts up with insane power shortages might be really net/tech savvy and perhaps not all of them are using services like Google Latitude adn Foursquare.
It would be a very useful feature for some though – I see how inconsistent and tedious reporting can get on having to enter the whole thing including address/location on every instance of a powercut.
[...] and collaboration PowerCutsIN on Twitter: for community outreach Diverse report channels Modified deployment theme (Not active [...]