Homestar

Homestar is an online tool that allows New Zealand home owners to find out how well their home is performing in terms of energy, water, waste and health and comfort. Homestar is a joint venture between BRANZ, Beacon Pathway and the New Zealand Green Building Council, with support from leading suppliers in the New Zealand Building industry.

Sparks were introduced to the project via Alt group who created the branding and marketing strategy behind Homestar.

The Sparks-Homestar team underwent an intensive research and planning phase with the key technical teams to create an online version of an Excel based home rating calculated that had been created over a 2 year period. This was done using a Drupal front end for all user management over a Symfony back end to manage the calculator engine. The flexibility of the calculator build allows the Homestar admins to manage every step of the questionnaire, from questions, to answers, imagery and points allocation.

A detailed design strategy was also key to ensuring users would complete the multi-section questionnaire (running to some 50 questions). To date the completion ratio has been a testament to the quality of the design and understanding of the target audience.

A reporting interface has also been built to allow daily, weekly and monthly analysis of user interaction on the site.