As has become the normal format of these group critiques, we all placed the links to our dashboard prototypes on a Miro board. From here our lecturer went through everyone’s one by one to give individual feedback and other members of the class could either comment at this stage or leave sticky notes with their feedback on the Miro board.
I was aware that my dashboard was not fully developed so I was looking forward to receiving feedback so I could go away and improve it before the final hand-in.
The first thing that came up was to do with some of my font sizes being on the small side, this was a fair remark I did have space to increase the size and make it easier for users. As this is an easy fix I will definitely do this. As part of my design I have placed the usability of my dashboard high on my list of priorities so anything I can do to make my dashboard more usable I will do.
Something that wasn’t mentioned explicitly but that I noticed while my dashboard on the screen was that my lecturer regularly went to click on the circles in my bottom navigation bar. Rather than the triangles at each end which were the only pieces I had connected to navigate between the cards in my layout. I took this to mean he expected these to also offer a way to navigate between the different cards. I noted this down as if this is something users are going to expect then I need to provide that capability. Here is my bottom navigation layout for context:
Another point that was made was the way I had set up my top navigation menu, what I had done was create another set of mini cards that appeared when you clicked on an item in the top navigation. However, when it came to seeing this layout on the big screen I could see a number of issues with this layout, firstly the mini cards were too small and hard to use, they also did not fit smoothly within the layout I had, they looked out of place. The advice I was given was to remove these and simply link the top navigation items to the larger, more detailed version of the main chart in that category. However, I feel that this creates another issue, it only leaves one way to access my other charts and illustrations. So I will need to find another solution that allows users to view all my data visualisations, but that also fits with the overall layout of the dashboard. Here are the mini cards:
The last point that was made was something I was already questioning myself, my typographic data visualisation, I had taken inspiration for these from the Feltron Reports, but my version simply did not work. So I needed to think of another way of displaying this data that was clearer and more visually appealing.
I also asked for some advice on how to make users aware of the hover features I had placed within my dashboard, and I was advised that when a user hovered over one of the words that were attached to an hover the word should change colour and this makes sense. So I will implement this to make it clearer to users that there is more to discover with these hover effects.
I also received some peer feedback via the Miro board, which was very useful and was interesting to get more feedback from other people in the class. Here is a screen shot of the Miro board showing that feedback.
On the first piece of feedback about the different types of graph, I actually have quite a lot of variety of graphs, donut charts, line charts, bar charts, maps and different illustrations. Unfortunately as the time that can be dedicated to each individuals work in a critique where there are quite a few to get through, means that my dashboard and variety of charts was not fully explored on screen, so the rest of the class didn’t get to see all the data visualisations I had created. What they saw mainly was my main dashboard screen, where for consistency reasons I had decided to start each category with a donut chart of an overview of a major piece of data about that topic. So, based on what was shown during the critique this is fair feedback I don’t need to actually create any different graphs, they are there I just need to make it more obvious there is more to find although I feel with more time, to spend looking at the dashboard people would realise there is a lot more to discover.
As for the second piece of peer feedback this is something I have been thinking about a lot, in trying to keep a consistent colour palette for each category, I have been using tints and shades of the same colour. This has led to some colours not having enough contrast against the background or sometimes the colour beside it. I will need to look into solutions to this issue as I still want to keep an overall colour palette for each category.
As I mentioned above making my font sizes a little bigger was an easy fix that I implemented straight away changing my top navigation from this: