How to handle different orders of magnitude in GMT display

[ArneTR]

The reason for this discussion that although we got multiple requests from people saying "Watt hours is more known to people than Joule" we very often see results like:

• Total energy: 0.01 Wh
  or
• Total energy: 0.01 Wh +/- 48%
  or this
  

or similar. When comparing those visually the user is very confused as the unit is so coarse that a lot of the accuracy is cut-off.

Going to mW solves this problem but creates a new one where then some energies look like:

• Total energy: 16278371.03 mWh
  or this
  

Both cases are horrible UX. However it is probably also horrible UX to have constantly changing orders of magnitude everywhere:

• Total energy (Run 1): 1.2 kWh
• Total energy (Run 2): 14 mWh

The question is where to go from here. GMT as a tool is able to handle very large and very small measurements. How can we streamline this?

[ArneTR]

@ribalba Would love your opinion on this

[ribalba]

So the interesting thing is that you will need to see the same metric on the page. Especially in this view it would be very confusing to have one in mWh and one in Wh and the next in kWh. So I would keep it constant on a page level. And then probably look at the biggest value and not have this longer than 4 digits. 4125 is a number I can still keep in my head.

What we could also allow is a pulldown somewhere where people can also change the unit if they want more detail.

[ArneTR]

This has been idle for a while and I really have not come to a conclusion that satisfies all requirements.

We easily have values thata are 0.001 and also values that are 400000 mWh. So without different orders of magnitude in the unit ala mWh and kWh I cannot fulfill the "at max 4 digits" requirement.

For now I have choosen to use mWh as I deem it more critical to not have 0.00 standing there (as we round of at two digits after the dot) than having a too large number.