An empirical investigation of domestic energy data visualizations

Abstract Which device in your home uses the most electricity? Many people have a poor understanding of their domestic energy consumption. In this paper, we evaluated three data visualizations used to deliver feedback. These were: (1) an aggregated line graph – showing changes in total electricity consumption over time, (2) a disaggregated line graph – showing changes in electricity consumed over time but separated out at the appliance-level, and (3) an area-based visualization – showing the cumulative energy consumed by different appliances over a given time period. In an experiment, 65 participants used one of these three visualizations to make sense of the same pattern of domestic electricity data. Participants who used the area-based visualization gained a more accurate understanding of how much electricity different domestic appliances were using compared to participants who were shown time series data. These results suggest that the choice of data visualization will impact people's understanding from smart metering systems, and that appliance-wise disaggregation offers the most promising approach for visualizing domestic electricity consumption data.