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QA Graphics's New HTML Energy Efficiency Education Dashboard Built to Showcase an Iowa Nature Center
QA Graphics is excited to announce the creation of an HTML Energy Efficiency Education Dashboard (EEED) that will be housed at the Indian Creek Nature Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. September 15-18th is the grand opening weekend where an open house will be held for the Amazing Space at the Indian Creek Nature Center. A Connection Ceremony will commence at 11 am on Friday the 15.th Activities will continue all weekend with free activities open to the public such as: tours, live music, food, children activities, and more.
An Energy Efficiency Education Dashboard is one feature of this new space. The EEED is a web application that educates building occupants by showcasing real-time energy data and green building features. Highlighting sustainable efforts of a building working towards a green certification. The benefit of QA Graphic’s dashboards is that they can be displayed anywhere, a standalone kiosk or any web-enabled device. Each dashboard is customized and built to the need of each client using the customer’s branding, helping the dashboard feel cohesive with the rest of their building or website.
Indian Creek Nature Center’s dashboard contains:
- Building performance information for electricity and water usage, as well as PV production. This will show the current usage or production, as well as a chart showing historical data compared with baseline data.
- Green tips on how to save energy at home.
- Green features hotspot maps. These show where all the green features are within the building and campus site. Users can select a hotspot and see an image and description of the feature, or they can view some demo videos to learn how the features work.
- A Living Build Challenge Checklist (http://living-future.org/lbc/about). This area breaks down the different ways Indian Creek Nature Center received certification through the Living Building Challenge.
- An interactive map of attractions along the Cedar-Wapsi Recreational Byway. This map shows the 17 different education, recreation, and cultural attractions located along the Highway 13 corridor.
- An extended weather forecast for Cedar Rapids.
Energy Efficiency Education Dashboard – The EEED is a web application that educates building occupants by showcasing real-time energy data and green building features. The EEED highlights sustainable efforts made in the design and construction of a building, which may help acquire points toward LEED® certification. QA Graphics’ dashboards are used by schools, universities, businesses, healthcare facilities, and data centers. Applications can be displayed in a common area via large format kiosk displays or on any web-enabled device.
Read the release here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/09/prweb13650319.htm
Taco Case Study
Download the PDF version HERE.
Executive Summary
This report was commissioned to study how QA Graphics worked with Taco Comfort Solutions to enhance their system graphics and user experience.
Taco worked with QA Graphics to upgrade their functional, templated app into one that was also well-designed and intuitive.
By working with QA Graphics, Taco gained:
- An application with an improved user experience that embraces Taco’s brand standards
- A highly detailed graphics symbol library that depicts Taco’s equipment
- Savings in time and money
About Taco Comfort Solutions
Taco Comfort Solutions is a third-generation American manufacturer of high quality and high efficiency heating, cooling, plumbing, and irrigation products.
Taco is based in Cranston, Rhode Island, but is global in scope with manufacturing facilities in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Arkansas, Ontario, Vietnam, and Italy. Its skilled employees produce precision pumps, valves and controls, air-dirt separators, heat exchangers, tanks, domestic hot water recirculation systems, and web-based building management controls.
Taco is committed to reaffirming and strengthening the values that have shaped the family-owned business since 1920. This is especially important in a fast-changing, increasingly global marketplace. Taco believes that the strong working partnerships and enduring commitment to product quality will enable them to remain competitive and keep Taco vital well into the future.
Challenges
Taco currently sells a building management tool called the LCI-3. This tool works well in its target market, but has only received small functional updates over the years, and no design improvements. The product’s functionality was fine, but the outdated look and feel was not up to par with what Taco and their customers needed.
The theme did not encompass the company’s brand and style. The LCI-3 tool also lacked the equipment graphics which had become expected by the market. Taco offered other options to provide standard graphics to their customers, but these standardized graphics did not give Taco’s building management tool the personal touch clients wanted. Taco wanted to create a custom graphics package, but didn’t have any in-house graphic design resources.
Taco’s engineering department originally created the custom graphics needed for their application. However, the engineers had very little graphic design experience, and the company still felt the graphics were missing their mark. The introduction of consumer-facing products had rapidly advanced the market standards for HVAC industry graphics and interfaces.
“We knew to play at the next level we would need help,” said Danato Borelli, director of engineering at Taco Comfort Solutions.
How QA Graphics Helped
Taco had seen QA Graphics’ work used by other industry businesses. These projects gave Taco an idea of how QA Graphics could enhance their building control application. The company wanted to work with QA Graphics to enhance the app’s user experience and create a more sophisticated symbol library.
User Experience
QA Graphics’ user experience (UX) designers understand the importance of creating visually appealing interfaces that put the user’s needs first and incorporate a company’s branding. After getting a feel for Taco’s vision for the application, the designers explored the app’s functionality and brainstormed design ideas.
QA Graphics created an application map to visualize the flow of the application and made suggestions on how to improve navigation or simplify a page’s content. The UX designers also researched different ways to marry Taco’s branding with digital design trends. These efforts made the application’s design cohesive, modern, and logical. Users could easily navigate between the different application areas, including a control view with real-time monitoring, activity logs, data trending, and more.
The application was built to work at different sizes on several different devices. QA Graphics designed two separate mock-ups per page to help Taco’s developers visualize how the application would look on different screens. These page mock-ups were sized for vertical mobile devices and horizontal tablets. Once these mock-ups were approved, QA Graphics sent Taco any development specs, images, icons, color values, and font information needed to build the page within the application.
The design theme and assets that QA Graphics created will be critical as Taco attempts to expand their product family across more non-traditional offerings. The controller graphical assets will provide a template for Taco to use across other platforms and create a more consistent style between their products.
Symbol Library
Taco also worked with QA Graphics’ 3D designers and Building Automation System (BAS) specialists to create a custom symbol library and mechanical equipment graphics. QA Graphics’ symbol library offers static and animated graphics, including unit ventilators, under floor units, tanks, rooftop units, and more.
QA Graphics’ specialists are experts in the BAS graphics industry and worked with Taco to build a robust symbol library. QA Graphics created all the 3D graphics and piping needed to build the system graphics within the application. The app’s library now features superior graphic representations of a user’s system, including dynamic graphics, moving fans, and pumping pumps.
Customer Experience
Taco’s team became more excited about the project as QA Graphics worked through the application upgrade and sent updates. The company was able to see how their work could be re-imagined with a modern, updated design, while leaving their desired functionality intact. QA Graphics’ designers transformed Taco’s functional but visually unappealing application and into a presentation piece that Taco is proud to display. Taco now has a product that matches their customer’s expectations.
When asked about the process and work of QA Graphics, Borelli said, “I think that QA Graphics has a really talented team of people who can help HVAC companies move their product designs to a much more polished level. The team was friendly, easy to work with, and offered good value for the time and money spent.”
Post Production
Taco’s new product is close to its launch date, and they have all the graphical assets they need to prepare the application for release. The design process required very little work to be done on Taco’s part. Their engineers were able to refocus their limited time on product functionality, allowing for an overall faster launch for LCI-4. Taco saved time and money in resources when they hired QA Graphics’ professionals to work on their application.
Taco’s new LCI-4 application features a modern style that embraces Taco’s branding. Taco’s graphics are now custom, highly detailed, and accurate representations of clients’ systems. These graphics are controlled entirely through the app QA Graphics helped upgrade. LCI-4’s design is better what than Taco could have created without QA Graphics’ expertise, and the design process did not eat up engineering resources.
“Working with 2-3 experienced designers at a high level was very much worth the cost of the project. There is no way that Taco could have sourced this level of HVAC design talent locally. Sales numbers will likely increase after product launch as well,” said Borelli.
About QA Graphics
QA Graphics is a leader in the building automation and green building industries. The company specializes in HVAC graphic development services, system graphics, floor plan graphics, and Energy Efficiency Education Dashboards™ (EEEDs). The company also provides marketing solutions such as interactive applications, 3D design and animation, UX design, videos, and more.
Since 2006, QA Graphics has served as an expert design resource for the building controls industry and is able to provide BAS graphics for any type of building automation. QA Graphics has collaborated with several leading control system manufacturers and private companies to develop custom libraries. These graphics are embedded within the control manufacturing software to provide a consistent style on any BAS. Offering a competitive advantage in the building automation system industry with more appealing and realistic graphics than typically provided with BAS software.
Visit www.qagraphics.com to learn more.
Download the PDF version HERE.
QA Graphics Offers Expertise to Ensure Quality Products
QA Graphics, a leader in the graphic outsourcing industry, seeks continuous improvement during every stage of their design/build process. Key product offerings such as system graphics and templates must maintain a performance level that is compatible with various platforms to provide the highly efficient outputs clients are seeking to attain. QA Graphics achieves this goal through professionally trained staff whose expertise is evident on various platforms and possess great focus on customer expectations.
QA Graphics recently demonstrated going to the next level of customer satisfaction, with an established client whose business relationship with QA Graphics has grown over the past four years. Their service needs have ranged from floor plans, system graphic backgrounds, and U.I. design. Most recently they have come full circle to turn key graphic solutions.
“Making sure our clients get a high quality and efficient product is our top priority,” said QA Graphics BAS Manager, Steve Chase. “Our designers meet with this client’s team bi-yearly to discuss what the process is now and how we can improve the current product offering, but also what we can do together to help streamline their graphical output. During the latest meeting it was discussed that while our output was at a high level, there was some on site work that is inevitable on any job.”
Teamed up, QA Graphics and their client developed a plan to reduce the touchup work by fine-tuning QA Graphics standards to better emulate the final output the client was seeking. This plan was based off of desired output level, QA Graphic’s expertise, and a blend of the qualities that QA Graphics was doing that appealed to the client. A site visit was also completed, as well as training multiple QA Graphic’s staff to offer point mapping with the platform, Trane® TracerTM ES & SC and Tridium Niagara. The new blended output improved efficiency for both parties, reduced cost, and improved future collaborative efforts with QA Graphics and the client’s participating branches.
Point Binding Implementation – QA Graphics Point Binding Implementation is the process of remotely accessing a client’s BAS system to install and bind the graphics needed. QA Graphics is also able to build the graphics offline, allowing you to bind. This allows building facilities managers to see in real time their building automation system working and at what capacity. QA Graphics provide point binding implementation for six of the largest control companies in the building automation industry. Visithttps://www.qagraphics.com/point-binding-implementation/ to see examples.
About QA Graphics – QA Graphics is a leader in the building automation and green building industries. The company specializes in HVAC graphic development services, system graphics, floor plan graphics, and Energy Efficiency Education Dashboards™ (EEEDs). These dashboards help organizations teach occupants about building performance and sustainability. The company also provides marketing solutions such as interactive applications, 3D design and animation, UX design, videos, and more. Visithttps://www.qagraphics.com to learn more.
See the press release at: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/07/prweb13584183.htm
QA Graphics Sponsors Elkhart City Festival 6/25/2016
Giving back to the surrounding communities is important to us here at QA Graphics. We believe that our contributions and leadership efforts help provide a positive impact back to the community that our business and employees reside in. QA Graphic’s business may be about building automation, interactive and multimedia platforms (www.qagraphics.com) but we are also about building relationships with our employees and clients, while interacting in their communities.
QA Graphics gives back in various ways throughout the year. The Elkhart City Festival June 25th, 2016 is just another way to do just that and to adhere to our core value of being fun and optimistic. We are proud to be one of the great sponsors for this event and know that it will provide a family fun atmosphere.
Giving back to the community should be on every business’s list of top priorities and we here at QA Graphics make sure that it is. We hope that you can
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others,”
the everlasting words of Gandhi.
