Creating CarbonHub

Introduction

Problem

Goals

Research

Outcome

EnergyCAP already tracks utility usage, making it straightforward to generate scope 1 and 2 emissions from that data. However, as organizations expand their sustainability goals, there's a growing need to track additional types of emissions—especially scope 3. Our goal was to create a standalone application that could ingest utility data from EnergyCAP, but also allow users to manually enter and manage all types of emissions data.

Role: UI/UX Designer
Team: Two UX Designers
Tools: Figma, Miro, Maze

While EnergyCAP supports scope 1 and 2 emissions generation through utility data, it doesn't support broader emissions tracking like scope 3 nor allow for manual recording of emissions. This left organizations without a central way to track their full emissions picture. Additionally, many users wanted a tool that didn't rely solely on automated utility data—they needed manual entry and flexibility to track emissions from all sources.

Why it mattered:
With increasing regulatory requirements and corporate sustainability goals, emissions tracking is becoming essential. Organizations need a flexible, scalable way to capture emissions data.

Create a standalone application that works with or without EnergyCAP
Allow users to manually enter and organize any type of emissions
Ability to support varied emissions structures and workflows

I had to learn about emissions as a whole. EnergyCAP’s bread and butter was utilities but at the time no one on the team knew anything about emissions.

We conducted a competitive analysis to explore how other platforms handled emissions tracking. We looked at:

Which emissions metrics competitors prioritized and what they looked like
How they structured data
How users navigated and interacted with their emissions systems
Widget ideas

We looked at the following organizations to understand emissions reporting: CDP, GRI, EPA, SASB, and AASHE.

As a team, we conducted interviews with users to validate our direction and information. It was insightful to learn who our customers were reporting to and how they needed their data to be presented.

Key insights:

Users needed a way to either reflect their EnergyCAP facilities structure or create an independent structure
Users report emissions to multiple places: government, stakeholders, students, non profits, etc.
We could create and align an emissions tracking flow with familiar EnergyCAP paradigms. We created three objects that work very similarly to EnergyCAP objects:
- Emission sources are like meters
- Emission records are like utility bills
- Collections are like organizations and act as groupings for emissions sources

This metaphor helped bring consistency to the product while giving users freedom to create their own hierarchy.

The final CarbonHub experience included: