Developed with Sunnie Sang, Zooly is an energy tracking app for household appliances. Inspired by the concept of energy disaggregation, or breaking down whole-home energy signal and into separate component appliances, we envision it to be a service provided by local power companies to help families conserve energy and money.

Zooly puts a playful spin on energy tracking by visually personifying home appliances as living, breathing pets in a menagerie of sorts. They can be healthy, sick, a “vampire” sucking too much energy, or a “ghost” and hopefully, they prompt owners to be more mindful of how they use their appliances. The prototype below focuses specifically on 3 parts of the Zooly experience: 1) how to add a new appliance 2) how to monitor all appliances 3) how to look into a specific appliance.

The main dashboard view reflects all appliances added to Zooly. Users can swipe left and right to see their whole set of appliances.

Appliance health

One of the interesting design challenges for this app was visually representing the health of an appliance at first glance. We took inspiration from anime and cartoon drawings to express four common conditions: healthy, sick (needs maintenance), vampire (an energy waster), and ghost (unplugged).

Zooly will also provide recommendations on how to better maintain and save energy for any given appliance, like replacing an AC's filter or unplugging a vampire toaster. Users can also see a forecasted cost of running an appliance during off and peak hours and share how well it performs in comparison to a standard appliance on the market.

Design process

At the start, we explored various directions related to household informatics and data visualization. This is one of 3 user experience storyboards we made; the last image of appliances "sleeping" is what ultimately inspired our idea for Zooly.

From there, we dove into concept sketching, paper prototyping, and outlining of flows and the rest is history.