With the advent of learning analytics, dashboards have become increasingly used in education to help teachers, students, administrators, and designers. There are three common types of dashboards that have received some attention: student-facing learning analytics dashboards, teacher-facing learning analytics dashboards, and designer-facing continuous improvement dashboards. Each of these types of dashboards has a unique purpose and accompanying design considerations (Kemsley, 2018), but the overarching purpose of each is to coalesce lots of data down to manageable, actionable bits and to present this information to targeted viewers in a way that will help them improve learning (either for themselves or for someone else).

In terms of ARC, all dashboards emphasize comprehension—attempting to help the viewer understand the meaning of underlying analytics data. Appeal is also very important, however, because viewing so much data can be wearying and confusing to viewers, and paying attention to design details that make dashboards pleasing and interesting will help encourage its use. Retention is the least important of the three for dashboards, because it is assumed that viewers will return to the dashboard when they need new insights on the data and that anything they see is readily actionable without having to remember details for an extended period.

For this project, you will create a mockup for a dashboard of your choice, focusing on helping either students, teachers, or designers to make sense of data.

Task

Create a mockup of your own, original dashboard using Adobe Illustrator or another program.

Requirements

• Design with either students, teachers, or designers as your targeted viewers.
• Include all relevant information that would be useful for your targeted viewers in the context you've selected.
• You may use either real or fictional data. Some fictional data sources that might be useful are available here, or you may also use available open data sets.
• Use appropriate graphical elements for each presented data type.

Guidelines

• Keep it simple. There is power in simplicity. Dashboards should take messy, complex data and refine it to something that is simple and actionable.
• Use appropriate visuals. Different visuals have different strengths and purposes. Pie charts are great for showing representation but poor for showing change over time, while histograms are the opposite. Choose visual types that are appropriate for each type of data presented.
• Be consistent. Even though you may use different types of visuals, keep the overall theme and tone consistent whenever possible in terms of colors, fonts, spacing, stroke widths, and so forth.
• Plan for flow. As you present more and more on the screen, the flow of your viewers' eyes becomes increasingly important to consider, because it can be easy for them to get lost in a sea of graphs. Use element placement, spacing, and color choices (e.g., eyes are drawn to brighter and warmer colors) to facilitate flow through the dashboard.
• Build on others' work. You don't have to create everything from scratch. Use existing design guides and user interface design kits whenever possible, especially when creating buttons, drop-downs, and other interactive and common elements.

Tutorial Videos

Creating Graphs in Adobe Illustrator

How to Create Graphs in Adobe Illustrator

Infographic Dashboard

Evaluation Criteria

References