Usability Requirements for Smart Buildings’ Performance Testing Solutions: A Survey

Applications for performance monitoring of buildings are highly relevant for achieving optimal building behaviour. Thus, there is an interest in developing highly usable and portable solutions. The primary stakeholders of performance monitoring solutions for buildings are building/facility managers as end users. There is a high diversity in buildings’ types, degrees of instrumentation in buildings, buildings’ management tasks, educational background of managers, etc. Each of these factors can impact a manager’s preferences for functionality and visualization of a performance testing application. Our prior work establishes a generic performance testing framework for automatic instantiation and execution of applicable performance tests. To gain qualitative feedback and insight regarding usability requirements for our framework, we conducted a series of structured interviews among seven building managers, covering 8 commercial buildings in Scandinavia and China, with a total area of 346500m². Each interview was conducted with a questionnaire on the building’s type, degree of instrumentation, current setups of metering and sensing hardware, data storage, certification etc., featuring examples of visualising performance evaluation data for open-ended discussions. The results show an interest for simple visualization techniques, requiring little to no expertise in building management to understand. Furthermore, the majority of the respondents have expressed interest in live performance evaluation, regardless of building type, supporting the movement towards smart energy.