GHG Tracker

Icon credit: Anna Campainha

GHG Tracker is an application created for Hawaiian Electric Industries, the customer that we were fortunate enough to work with for our Software Engineering II class. From a spreadsheet that the customer used to log down an employee’s day-to-day travels and its corresponding carbon emissions, we were to produce an application that would tell the user about their carbon emissions for a specified time: the amount of carbon dioxide that they had emitted, saved, the amount of miles that they travel, and as of right now, the number of telework days. Similarly, they wanted a feature where users could log down and compare their gas vehicles to hybrid/electric ones to display what the user could be saving financially and environmentally. Throughout the semester, we would meet with the customer periodically to present the progress on our projects.

The application includes a variety of features and widgets for the convenience of the user, such as a user page that displays the user’s mileage per mode of transportation to a leaf widget that would display how close the user was to saving a certain amount of carbon dioxide, that of which the amount that they had saved so far would have taken a certain amount of trees to absorb. The landing and cumulative pages also pair graphics with the data to make it simple and pleasing for the user, such as the cloud on the landing page that displays the current amount of carbon dioxide that the GHG Tracker community had saved. Users were also able to easily add the vehicles that they owned and view them and their data. Similarly users are able to log down their travels for their gas and alternative forms of transportation, as well as save trips that they frequently take and filter their trips. The application also encourages users to consider alternative transportation and hybrid/electric vehicles such as a What If feature that allows users to plan out their trips and see what they could be saving if they use alternative transportation over their gas vehicle to a comparator feature where users could log down and compare their gas vehicles to hybrid/electric ones to display what the user could be saving financially and environmentally. Finally, users could compare their carbon dioxide saved and produced to the community average and are recommended a variety of alternative modes of transportation per island.

Having a semi-real world customer-developer experience was one of the most rewarding experiences of my undergraduate career. I enjoyed collaborating and working with my teammates to create this application, as well as the chance to work on my techncial and soft skills. With each code review, team meeting, and customer review, it helped me to foster this developer-customer balance: implementing features while keeping the audience of the application in mind, effectively communicating the features of the application to the customer, as well as building upon the fundamentals of web development.

You can view our project here, and our project home page here.