Redesigning Daily Blackouts Schedule

As you may know, these days I live in Lviv, Ukraine. It’s war happening, and ruzzia targets our civilian infrastructure. Which makes us having no electricity as one of the benefit of neighbouring ruzzia.

• I have a separate blog, where I write about my life through the war, if you’re interested. Its name is war.basil

Context

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The electricity company publishes daily schedules for electricity cut-offs through their channels. Those are Telegram, Viber, their website.

The schedules design is okayish, but there’s one thing that makes them difficult to read for me, the colours. (Wait for it.)

I wrote about this topic previously, in my story about redesigning weekly blackout schedule, where I attempted to redesign the whole thing for myself.

Now, I’m attempting to redesign it for others.

These days, we don’t have weekly schedule, but a daily one. It’s a new schedule each day. (Sometimes it’s cancelled, if we’re lucky.) They publish it in the evenings, and update within the following day.

Red Lite Green Lite

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That’s how current schedule look:

It’s hours on the up (it’s even worse this time: 24 hours each hour written twice), and groups on the left. There’s no maybe these days. It’s either on or off. Binary.

Would you take black and white for binary? Nobody would! It’s red or green, babe!

Apparently, it’s still — you guessed it right! — 🎶 Red Light Green Light! 🎶

Turn on, let’s go! Red light, green light!

Redesign

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This time I decided I’ll do two things:

1. I’ll try to keep everything they have, so my template could be made public.
2. I’ll email to the company and show them my design, asking for it to be implemented, if possible.

With keeping everything they have it was easy. Apart from being RED FUCKING GREEN, it’s okay-ish. It’s not that completely bad. It could be usable, if not red and green.

Have you turned off the music!? Turn it on! Now!

I change two things in the design:

1. I made it vertical, for smartphones. Nobody checks blackouts from their computers and huge ultrawide screens when there’s no electricity. Everyone checks this schedule from their smartphones. Trust me, you don’t even need analytical department for that. Most people have their smartphones as their personal computers these days.
2. I made it black and white.

   Oh how boring. Do we pay you for everything being black and white?!

Ah, I forgot to mention they introduced the number of hours everyone had since the beginning of the month. People didn’t trust the company was equally turning off electricity for everyone. Weird, yet, well, understandable.

People are different. Someone blames electricity company for blackouts, not fucking ruzzians that send missiles on our civilian heads.

I added this to the design as well. It’s mostly black-and-white, but elements of low priority are in gray colour. So the whole set won’t be too black-and-white, you know.

Notifying the Company

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I couldn’t find any public form or email I could send my redesign to, but I found two email contacts on their ‘vacancies’ page.

My wild guess, they’ll never reply. I’ve tried similar redesign quest many times. They usually just ignore me. No ‘thank you,’ no ‘thank you, but no, thank you’ either. Since it’s more likely to be government company, not a private one, they ought to be on the verge of incompetence. So I don’t expect them to even reply. Although, I just hope that it’s better here than I sometimes think of them to be. In any case, it costs me nothing to let them know I have a proposition of a better design.

I offered them my services. For free. But with one condition only, what I offer would be implemented, so the work won’t be wasted.

I can implement my design on different possible levels,

• from helping their design person to modify their original design slightly, to make it better;
• to implementing everything possible, including updating their website and helping automating the notification stuff.

Additionally, I could design (and even develop) the whole automatisation stack. So the responsible person (or persons, plural) could update schedules from their iPhone smartphone.

But here’s the catch. Would they even reply? You cannot pitch your skills for someone who just ignores you.

• I’m not too busy with any work right now, and more likely, I’ll have another month without it anyway. (It’s Christmas holiday season right now.) So I may even join their company for a while, helping developing this department 🤞 (sarcasm, mostly)

Would they bother to reply?

I mean, I won’t blame them too much if they won’t, they have too much work these days. And they apparently do enough of their electro-magic to give us all electricity. But I would appreciate them at least replying to my email. Something akin to ‘thanks, we’ll explore’ with never replying back again would work better than nothing at all.

Aren’t they the vacancy contacts?

But knowing such companies. They’re unable to even value this work. Being it the private company, they could use my skills to their benefit, and even pay me money. Government company? In a post-soviet territory, they’re (still) too poisoned by the rotten system of the Soviets. Usually, they still have this ruzzian approach: I owe you nothing, and you owe me everything.

I would never do the same thing for ruzzian or Belarusian government. I absolutely despise them. I’m just curious, is this current system healed enough to become a lean, transparent, efficient, and humane? Or would it take generations to shove off the ruzzian filth? It’s 30 years already.

Next Steps

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It’s not my final design. It was deliberately kept as simple as possible. To not scary ‘the client’ off. To demonstrate the whole thing could be much better with minimal tools.

Also, the electric company announced that they’ll double the number of groups, so it’ll become 12, not 6 of them.

Would the design fit? I’m joking, it surely will. The rectangles can become squares, easily. Although, more likely I’ll update the design more thoroughly.

I plan to do that the next week.

Also, I’d like to re-format the task, and try to imagine the ideal scenario of how could this task could be implemented in an ideal scenario.

What if the society be tech-savvy? What if those who work in that company be tech-savvy too? Oh, it would be so much more interesting! Stay tuned.