Saving the world one hotel at a time

12/2/2011 10:12 AM EST

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) have created Green Engage, a pioneering environmental application which helps hotels to meet the sustainability challenge by enabling them to input and monitor their energy and water usage, and to sign up to suggested actions that will:

• Reduce carbon footprint
• Reduce energy and water consumption
• Raise guest and staff awareness of sustainability

Sigma carried out a full root and branch redesign and development of the application to dramatically improve usability, enhance functionality, and ensure the system was more readily adopted by hotels. Hotels can set-up and manage their own account, input usage data, obtain comprehensive reporting information both through a dashboard approach and at a more detailed level, and manage their own action plan based specifically on their profile, needs, footprint, energy usage and challenges.

We provided user experience expertise throughout the design phase, managing remote user analysis, requirements gathering, iterative creative design, user testing and rapid prototyping. Feedback on the new version of Green Engage has been excellent and we are delighted that the application scored 96.6% on the System Usability Scale (SUS) as independently tested by the Usability Centre at Southern Polytechnic University in Georgia. Carol Barnum, Director of the Usability Centre and author of several well-known books on the subject, confirmed that in all of the studies conducted at the institute they had “yet to see a score this high”.

Sigma is now working on new and improved functionality for the next version of Green Engage that is due to launch in 2012.