Elemental are working with Oxford Sustainable Finance Programme (OxSFP) to transform their existing beta tool into a consumer-grade web-based application addressing the fundamental useability and performance issues with their beta version.
We embarked on a product discovery to clarify the purpose of the application and highlighted the key features for the intended user base. Following which we ran two parallel streams of work:
- User Interface Prototype – focus on guiding new users through using the application
- Technical audit of existing system to understand how to address performance issues and capture lessons learnt from initial implementation
The output of the discovery was a Technical Proof of Concept in which we demonstrated the feasibility of the browser to:
- Manage “asset portfolios” selecting subsets of assets into portfolios from potentially many hundreds of thousands of plants
- Generate and render complex geographical visualisations
With the technical assumptions validated we have now re-architected and rebuilt the solution, and in doing so, reduced the data flow between a user’s browser and the server side and placed the “boundary of trust” firmly onto the users desktop, rather than the server side – issues which were highlighted in our tech audit.
