I was not at this week’s lecture as I was on a University led employability trip to London. However, I still continued to work on putting my dashboard together for next week’s group critique. This involved creating the rest of the required data visualisations, and adding interactivity to the dashboard.
You can read more about the employers I visited as part of the London trip here: Week 11 London Employability Trip. When we have spoken in class about this particular dashboard project the reason we are doing it is the likelihood that many of us will be asked to design dashboards when we go on placement or into graduate roles. The need for well-designed easy to use dashboards to show the ever increasing amount of data being created is well known within the industry. As is the need to be able to represent and tell the story of data collected.
I mention this because at one of the employers we visited; Synechron, they specifically mentioned that designing dashboards for major banking and financial organisations was a key part of what they do. With a design office in Belfast and having taken students from our course on placement roles in the past, this showed the relevance of this project to furthering my career.
Whilst at Synechron they asked us to take part in a design exercise, one we undertook earlier in this module to come up with ideas called “Crazy Eights”. Its a simple enough concept you divide a piece of paper into eight squares and give yourself eight minutes to come up with eight solutions to the design problem you are working on. In this case we were asked to come up with eight ideas for a bank dashboard, as a realistic view into some of the work you could expect to be tasked with at Synechron. Here is a photo of my finished exercise:
I was lucky to be able while away to pick up a free copy of the Financial Times, the newspaper dedicated to business matters. With all the data produced by businesses I knew this would be a good source of inspiration for data visualisations. In the copy I looked at there were lots of data visualisations, mainly line and bar charts but also a map of Ukraine giving an overview of the latest picture in the war in that country. I noticed in these charts and the map the use of a very specific range of colours, across all the data visualisations no more than five colours were used. This gave all the charts a uniform and consistent appearance. Something I want to do as part of my dashboard by assigning a colour to each category of data and then using this colour as my base for each of my charts in that category. Below are examples of the charts I found:
