This week we had a group critique on our “A Week in the Life” Dashboards. This was a chance to get feedback from both our lecturer and classmates. As this was our last class of the semester it was also a final chance to get feedback to improve our final projects before final hand-in next week.
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.