Tölvumál - 01.11.2015, Blaðsíða 11

11
PUTTING IT ON THE TABLE
This fresher, cleaner design still bothered me. The labels on the gauges
are sometimes hidden behind the needles. The eyes need to jump
around a lot while reading. From the title of a gauge, to its value, to its
label etc. Normalizing the scales gave the dashboard a unified look and
more purpose to the needles, but we lost the some nuance in the
scales. And most importantly, the extreme values aren’t highlighted.
When things are important, they should ask for attention.
I tried putting a bright red oval behind the extreme values. A more
subtle way might be to put a red dot inside the gauges. But these
exercises are working around the problem; I’m not addressing the
elephant in the room. The gauges themselves. What will happen if we
just stop using them and order the information in a simple table?
With the data in a table we now have a lot more room for the labels. We
don’t need to center-align the label text, so it can be read from the left
to the right, from label to value. And important values can be highlighted
(image 2).
Image 2
But the context of the scales is now lost. With a maximum and minimum
value, we got a feeling for the location of the value. Now all we have is
a number without context. So let’s get some context back; loosen the
table up and add some bullet charts (image 3). I made up the color
class labels, as you can probably guess (if you speak Icelandic).
Image 3
That’s more like it! The length of the bar indicates how much trouble the
emergency unit is in. There are labels on each bullet chart that give
context to the scale of the problem. But we can show even more. What
if we could see if the current values are going up or down? If we change
the bars to bullets, we can show the value measured before the most
recent one as a faint bullet (image 4).
Image 4
Now we can see that even though A7 and A8 are in the red, they are
moving down. And although in the blue, A1, A5 and A6 are moving fast