The second project for this module was creating and designing a dashboard. This dashboard is to show a week in my life, so we were given the freedom of choosing what areas of our life we wanted to record.
I started this project by first deciding what data I would be collecting for the week. The data that I decided that I would collect is:
For the next week I then started tracking all of these things on paper. I decided that I should split these up into 4 sections, to make the dashboard less clustered. These 4 sections are: Travel/Activity, Finance, Screen Time/Music, and Health.
With the data on paper I then made an Excel sheet with all the data that I gathered over this past week. The reason why I done this was because I wanted to have a place where I could easily access all the data and also display it clearly before I started designing the dashboard.
The next thing that I done for this project was a competitor research. So I researched some other dashboards and diagrammatic data to see what I could find. I primarily wanted to find out what other competitors were doing and try to learn what techniques they used when it came to colour, typography, hierarchy, spacing etc. I wanted to find out as much about dashboards as possible.
The first dashboard that I looked at was one from a popular website called “Geckoboard”. This website gives users templates for creating their own dashboards, and I loved the look of this one when I first seen it. Firstly, the colour scheme of this dashboard is very nice, with the background colour being quite neutral and the bar chart elements being yellow and light blue, makes them pop out and draws attention. Colour is important when creating dashboards, as we want users to be drawn certain elements more than others. The next thing I noticed in this dashboard is that it is very nicely laid out, and there is a clear structure throughout. Horizontally it is split into two halves, and the bottom half is split into three vertically. This makes the dashboard very easy to understand and navigate, which is important as we want to display information as clearly as possible to users. Overall this dashboard does it’s job very well and also looks great.
