Netilion conserve
Enabling Sustainable Decision-Making for Water Treatment Plants
Project Overview
Project Title: Netilion Conserve
Context: Academic Project in collaboration with Endress+Hauser
Role: UX Strategist, Product Manager
Timeline: 3 months (Academic Project)
Team: A team of 3 HCI students
The Challenge
The water treatment industry is undergoing rapid transformation driven by sustainability goals, regulatory pressure, and technological advancement. While the global water treatment system market is valued at $36.41 billion and growing at a CAGR of 9%, organizations still struggle to effectively track, communicate, and act on sustainability data. Community and municipal water treatment plants, such as those operated by Citizens Energy in Indianapolis, play a vital role in delivering clean water and supporting sustainability initiatives.
How might we make it easier and more seamless for water treatment plants to track sustainability progress and activites?
My contribution and Impact
I played a key role in aligning business objectives, user needs, and technical feasibility. I designed interview questionnaires and conducted stakeholder interviews with representatives from Endress+Hauser and Citizens Energy. I performed a detailed business and environmental analysis to understand market trends, regulatory constraints, and operational realities within the water treatment industry.
I actively led ideation sessions to translate research insights into actionable product features and helped prioritize ideas based on feasibility and user impact. I designed medium- and high-fidelity prototypes of the dashboard and evaluated the medium-fidelity prototype with stakeholders. My contributions ensured that the final solution addressed both organizational pain points and long-term sustainability objectives.
Discovering the Problem through Research
We employed a multi-pronged research approach to understand both the organizational and industry-level challenges of sustainability tracking.We employed a mixed-methods research approach to truly understand the user's current situation and pain points.
Key Research Methods:
Stakeholder Interviews: Interviews with Endress+Hauser sponsors, a plant manager, and an environmental steward from Citizens Energy.
Environmental & Business Analysis: Studied market trends, government regulations, and sustainability mandates affecting water treatment plants.
Field Trip: Visited a Citizens Energy water treatment facility to understand workflows, sensor infrastructure, and data collection methods.
Thematic Analysis: Conducted affinity mapping to synthesize findings and identify recurring themes.
Key Findings:
Our research surfaced several critical challenges:
Siloed Teams
Different teams handle data, reporting, and strategy, making collaboration difficult.
Time-Intensive Processes
Collecting data, generating reports, and devising sustainability strategies can take over 80 hours.
Legacy Infrastructure
The industry is slow-moving, with rare upgrades to sensors and systems.
Infrequent Goal Tracking
Sustainability goals are reviewed far less often than necessary.
Designing the Solution: Netilion Conserve
Based on our research insights, we designed Netilion Conserve—a sustainability tracking dashboard that integrates real-time sensor data, supports collaboration, and simplifies reporting. The solution builds on Endress+Hauser’s Netilion ecosystem and adapts it to the specific needs of water treatment plants.
Key Design Decisions:
A central design decision was to treat sustainability tracking as a collaborative, ongoing process rather than a static reporting task. By embedding communication, delegation, and documentation directly into data visualizations, we reduced friction between teams and encouraged more frequent engagement with sustainability goals.
Custom Data Visualization
Users can create custom charts using live sensor data or connected Excel sheets.
Collaborative Annotations
Discussions can be started anywhere on a chart and converted into tasks.
Real-Time Connectivity
Seamless integration with existing sensors and infrastructure.
Template-Based Report Generation
Automated report creation aligned with EPA regulations.
Centralized Task & Discussion Hub
A “Memory Palace” allows teams to revisit past discussions and decisions.
Validation & Refinement
To validate our design, we conducted usability testing and stakeholder evaluations on the medium-fidelity prototype.
Key Feedback and Iteration:
Our usability evaluation uncovered some critical insights that shaped the final design. One major challenge was the absence of goal indicators on charts, which left users guessing about their progress toward sustainability targets. Another pain point was the lack of time-range filters, making it hard to focus on specific periods and reducing the overall value of the data visualizations. Finally, users expressed a strong need for comparing data from multiple sensors simultaneously, a feature essential for informed decision-making in complex water treatment environments. These findings became the foundation for our next iteration, driving improvements that made the dashboard more intuitive, actionable, and aligned with real-world workflows.
We prioritized these issues based on severity and implemented improvements in the final prototype, resulting in clearer visualizations, enhanced filtering, and improved data comparison.
The Final Prototype
Impact & Reflection
This project challenged me to work within a highly technical and unfamiliar domain. A key learning was the importance of immersing oneself in the real-world context—our field trip to the water treatment plant was instrumental in shaping a feasible and grounded solution.
Learnings:
Domain Immersion Matters: Observing real systems in action is critical when designing for complex industries.
Collaboration Drives Sustainability: Embedding communication into tools helps organizations move from tracking to action.
Usability Testing is Essential: Stakeholder feedback uncovered issues that internal reviews missed.
Shared Ownership Leads to Better Outcomes: Leveraging team strengths enabled us to deliver a more robust solution.
Netilion Conserve demonstrated how UX strategy and product thinking can transform sustainability from a compliance task into an actionable, collaborative process that supports long-term environmental and business goals.
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