Digital adoption of tools designed for energy communities still runs into a hurdle that few people talk about openly: the technology doesn’t just need to be good, it needs to be understood by the people who will actually use it every day.
And that gap between what a platform offers and what users can truly take advantage of is exactly what the COMMUNITAS project is trying to solve, using an approach that blends UX/UI research with eye tracking technology.
The initiative, funded by the European Union through the Horizon Europe program, starts from a simple and straightforward premise: a digital tool only creates real impact when users understand what it does, what data they need to provide, and what to do with the results.
It sounds obvious, but in practice, that’s precisely where so many tech solutions stall. COMMUNITAS is developing an open one-stop-shop platform for planning, participation, and optimization of community energy.
The real differentiator is that this platform brings together knowledge resources, investment planning, demand response, and monitoring functions all in one single digital environment. And that’s where COMMUNITAS is proving that investing in usability isn’t a cosmetic detail — it’s a basic requirement for energy innovations to reach beyond specialists and actually work for regular citizens, local administrators, and municipalities at the heart of the energy transition. 👇
What COMMUNITAS is doing differently
The project didn’t stop at developing a platform that just looks good on paper. The team went further and structured a validation process with real users, applying methods you typically see at major tech companies. The approach combines moderated usability tasks, eye tracking, short questionnaires, and reflective interviews.
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During a testing session, users perform realistic tasks on the central COMMUNITAS platform and on selected tools, while a screen-based eye tracker records fixations and reading paths, known as scanpaths. All of this is applied to a very specific context: digital platforms designed for managing and participating in energy communities — groups of citizens, municipalities, or organizations that share renewable energy resources collaboratively.
Using eye tracking in this context is especially interesting because it goes beyond what users say during a test. Heat maps show which areas of the interface attract attention, while gaze plots reveal the sequence of attention during a task. When combined with user actions and feedback, this visual data creates a much more honest picture of how the interface is actually performing — or failing to perform.
It’s worth noting that the team at ASM Research Solutions Strategy, responsible for this validation, is careful not to treat gaze data as a standalone explanation. The common mistake in many projects is exactly that: looking only at the heat map without cross-referencing it with actual user behavior. The method here is rigorous but always translated into practical recommendations ready to feed into the development cycle.
Why usability is critical for the energy transition
The energy transition isn’t just about physical infrastructure like solar panels, smart grids, and storage batteries. It increasingly depends on everyday people being able to actively participate in the process — making informed decisions about consumption, energy sharing, and collective resource management. And for that to happen at scale, the digital tools supporting this ecosystem need to be genuinely accessible, not just technically available.
This is where digital adoption becomes a critical bottleneck. Poorly designed platforms create friction at the very first steps of the user journey: during sign-up, when reading data, interpreting charts, or understanding the benefits that community participation generates. When that friction is too high, users abandon the tool, even if it has real potential for impact.
The UX/UI work done by COMMUNITAS starts from exactly this diagnosis. The first round of validation confirmed that the tools address a real need: they help users move from a general interest in energy communities to practical action. And the adoption issues identified weren’t technical in the sense of bugs or slow loading times. They were problems with visual communication, information hierarchy, and the language used in menus and navigation flows.
What eye tracking revealed about the COMMUNITAS tools
The COMMUNITAS platform brings together several tools that, combined, form a coherent path from learning to operation. Here’s a look at what each one does:
- Knowledge base: provides guidance with legal, technical, and administrative information.
- Investment advisor: helps users explore potential investment scenarios.
- Demand response tool: introduces flexibility and participation in energy markets.
- OPTIMEMS: offers dashboard-based monitoring and optimization.
Eye tracking added a crucial layer of understanding, showing where this path needs clearer signposting. On the main platform, for example, users do recognize its overall value, but they still hesitate when entry points aren’t explicit. A visible start here area for each tool — explaining its purpose, required data, and expected results — would reduce uncertainty and shorten the time to first success.
In the knowledge base, attention data reinforced the need for stronger search functionality, clearer topic labels, and a country-specific structure. This makes total sense because community energy is always local: incentives, terminology, and administrative steps vary from country to country and need to be easy to find.
The investment advisor is especially important because it turns curiosity into planning. Eye tracking can show whether users notice explanations, tooltips, and input guidance before starting a simulation. When gaze patterns keep bouncing back and forth between fields and help tips, the interface is signaling that the copy, grouping, or examples need improvement.
For the demand response tool, trust depends on feedback. Longer calculations need to clearly communicate progress, completion, and next steps. Otherwise, users assume the system has frozen or isn’t reliable. And for OPTIMEMS, the design challenge is moving from data visibility to decision visibility. Dashboards shouldn’t just display charts — they should help users decide what to compare, adjust, export, or do next. 🎯
From data to action: the improvement roadmap
One of the most interesting parts of this work is that it didn’t stop at diagnosis. Based on the evidence, the team built a very practical improvement roadmap with clear priorities:
- Strengthen trust through feedback mechanisms like progress indicators, clear end states, and confirmation messages.
- Make navigation more self-explanatory with labeled menus, consistent interaction patterns, and obviously clickable elements.
- Reduce cognitive load by using plain language, examples, and in-context validation.
- Improve readability with adequate contrast, appropriate font sizes, and sufficient spacing — keeping older users in mind as well.
- Deepen localization by structuring content around national rules, incentives, and practices specific to each energy community.
These actions aren’t separate from the technical development of COMMUNITAS. Quite the opposite — they help ensure that technically advanced tools can actually be adopted by real communities with varying levels of expertise.
What other energy initiatives can learn from this
The COMMUNITAS experience brings lessons that go well beyond the project itself. Across Europe — and in other regions too — energy community initiatives are emerging that rely on digital platforms to function. Solar energy cooperatives, municipal energy management consortiums, and demand response programs all need interfaces that regular citizens can use without specialized training.
Investing in user research from the earliest stages of platform development isn’t an extra cost — it’s a long-term savings strategy. Platforms that reach end users with serious usability problems generate high support costs, low retention rates, and in the case of energy communities, directly compromise the collective efficiency of the system.
COMMUNITAS demonstrates in practice how UX/UI research can accelerate digital innovation adoption in energy. Eye tracking makes hidden usability barriers visible — revealing overlooked controls, weak information hierarchies, unclear guidance, and insufficient feedback. By acting on these findings, the project is making its one-stop-shop platform more intuitive for citizens, energy community managers, and local stakeholders.
Putting users at the center of tool development for the energy transition isn’t a market trend — it’s a structural necessity. Large-scale digital adoption only happens when the technology respects the context, vocabulary, and familiarity level of the people who will use it. And methods like eye tracking, when applied thoughtfully within a robust UX/UI process, are exactly the kind of instrument that turns good intentions into interfaces that truly work for everyone. ⚡
