From the course: Interaction Design: Dashboards and Visualization

Displaying the right data - Sketch Tutorial

From the course: Interaction Design: Dashboards and Visualization

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Displaying the right data

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- [Instructor] When approaching designing dashboards, visualizations, and data, we'll need to understand our users and how they'll derive meaning from the data. Data is just a series of numbers, so our design needs to provide context and meaning to ensure we're helping our users tell the right story. The best way to understand how the user will use the data is to ask them. Some key questions to ask your users and project stakeholders are how will the data be used, what type of actions do you want to take after viewing the data, how often do you need to see the data, are there different people who will need to view the data, and how do normally derive the information you need. These questions are important to help understand how the data will be used and to get a sense of how often and how many user types will be viewing the data. Asking how they currently derive information helps to better understand if there's a gap in mechanisms or processes that might need to be addressed or incorporated as a potential data source. Another method of understanding your users' needs is to co-create the design with them. Typically, users have some idea of how they like the data to be laid out, so it's useful to sit down with customers and let them sketch some ideas out. You can ask questions and clarify details while they're sketching to get a better understanding of what they're trying to convey. This process helps to understand the type of actions they want to take with the data and which data is important to be visualized. Another method is to iterate on different designs and gain feedback from the users between iterations. For example, on a project I worked on, I created a design with a line graph. After showing it to users, the unanimous feedback was that the graph was unnecessary since the represented metric was less useful than others. This was good feedback which was incorporated into the next set of designs to show users. Prototyping and iteration for data design can be as simple as sketches on paper or quick wireframes. The goal is to gain feedback fast and iterate again. After asking questions or using iterative design approaches you should have clarity on which data's meaningful to your users to help with your design.

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