Dashboard Directory Design Feedback
The goal of this ticket is to gather design feedback about the proposed mocks to implement a dashboard directory. A portal where all our dashboards can be found at a glance. Leaving up to Pau to add members of design team.
Dashboard Directory mocks:
Search/Browse dashboards via tags:
https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/presentation/d/1sfaWlz0sU435mcWPHpdp6KHa8uwG_6GQH9wn0vkt8zc/edit#slide=id.g755137173_00
Design notes
The basic goal is to support finding dashboards and visualisations that present relevant data to the user.
In order to achieve that goal we considered:
- Support search and browsing. Users may or may not have a specific metric in mind. We need to allow users to easily find a metric they know but also to explore which are the metrics available in a project.
- Anticipate information. Nothing describes better a container than its contents.If we can bring forward some data, that will help users to understand what a dashboard/metric is about without the need to navigate to it.
- Optimise for repetition. Uses interested in a sub-set of the information should not be making the same selection again and again.
The basic aspects of the design consist of:
- Search bar to quickly find a dashboard/visualisation when you know what you are looking for.
- A list of dashboards:
- For each, a list of visualisations is shown.
- Option to mark as favourite both dashboards and visualisations. That would surface them on top making it easy to find them later.
The mockup below shows the basic elements listed above:
The basic elements above can be extended with:
- Tagging support. Tagging metrics facilitates filtering. Users can use tags while searching to find metrics with those tags. Users can also use tags while browsing (e.g., to quickly find other graphs similar to one they just found).
- Visualising metrics. Visualisations can be represented by text, but a more visual representation could be more helpful. In the examples above, for each visualisation the current value of the highest value metric is shown using a sparkline and the numeric value. The goal is to provide a compact and simple representation of a more complex graph. Other alternatives depending on the graph nature can be used.
- Time-based annotations. If annotations on graphs are supported, those can be surfaced too when representing those in the directory. In the example above, if there is a recent annotation, it is highlighted next to the visualisation.