Results of CEA UX Research Study’23 - Teaching

[ShiZhongming]

Somehow I forgot to post the User Experience Research Studies 2023 (Teaching) Results on Github.
I am posting them now.

@all_readers_of_this_issue, we welcome you to post your feedback to us for CEA as a teaching tool below. Thank you!

Time: 20 Sept 2023
CEA version: 3.34.2

Research Group: ETH’s MiBS Students attending IDP Class (~50% designers and ~50% engineers; most of them had UBEM experience; no CEA background)

Task: Using the CEA Dashboard, the students were asked to perform a sequence of two tasks. 
1. To create a 10-building scenario at Altstetten in Zurich
2. To simulate the energy demand. 
The two tasks were timed together. Tasks was aborted after 15 minutes.

Results: 
1. Scenario-creating: ~95% (18 out of 19) success rate after 5 minutes; 
2. Energy-demand simulation: 0% success rate after 15 minutes

Questions raised by the students and obervations (in sequence during the study):
1. On one personal windows, CEA Dashboard was completely white-out upon launching
2. One student raised the question - where to draw the boundary line to fetch the OSM data? The draw-on-map section should appear immediately after Data Management's Zone (Query zone geometry from Open Street Maps), and before ticking weather helper, surrounding helper, street helper.
3. What is the surroundings anyways?
4. Should’t be weather helper be linked automatically when working on a specific city?
5. Fail to load data from OSM, and the problem was solved when selecting another group of buildings nearby..
6. The concept or difference between project and scenario is initiative. At least 3 students raised the questions about what is a project? Some further the questions-why they cannot navigate between projects on the left-bar.
7. The error message is intimidating and few had scroll down to reach the HINT messages
8. Except for Tab Archetype Mapper, all other Tabs under Data Management are overlapping with the Create-a-new-scenario-launcher
9. One student raised the question: what is building name? —> should it be called cea-id? Internal id?
10. When updating zone helper, students tent to update floor_ag instead of heigh_ag. —> Intuitively, updating floor_ag should trigger the change of height_ag, as CEA is assuming 3-metre floor_height
11. To select building and highlight it to yellow, one has to click on the Building Name to make it happen. Clicking on the same row and other places does not work.
12. Self-defined parameters when editing the input data should be highlighted in a different color (e.g. red)
13. At least 5 students asked how to compare two scenarios, or how to duplicate two scenarios. —> How can we create multiple instances as derivative from the first/main scenario?

[jimenofonseca]

I see definately cool:
#2. Nice to have: The part of navigating to multiple projects.
#7. Indeed: it would be great if it does show only the problem.
#13 good to have. This has been a pending feature for a long time.

In my opinion. The rest of the points I do not see it as something one needs to invest time to reach a broader audience. It seem a clear explanation during teaching of the conventions and where to click could do.