RIOT” is a Risk Impact Online Tool that enables users to visualise the impact of climate change-related risks on industrial plants with high carbon emissions (such as power stations, steel foundries and cement works).
The challenge:
Oxford Sustainable Finance Programme (OxSFP) needed to transform its existing beta tool into a consumer-grade web-based application, addressing fundamental usability and performance issues in the beta version.
Our approach:
We embarked on a product discovery to clarify the application’s purpose and highlight key features for the intended user base. Following this we ran two parallel streams of work:
- User Interface Prototype – focus on guiding new users through using the application
- Technical audit of the existing system to understand how to address performance issues and capture lessons learnt from the initial implementation
The output of the discovery was a Technical Proof of Concept in which we demonstrated the feasibility of the browser to manage “asset portfolios” (selecting subsets of assets into portfolios from potentially many hundreds of thousands of plants) and to generate and render complex geographical visualisations.
The result:
With the technical assumptions validated, we have now re-architected and rebuilt the solution, and in doing so, reduced the data flow between a user’s browser and the server side, placing a “boundary of trust” firmly onto the user’s desktop, rather than the server side – issues which were highlighted in our tech audit.
