These dashboards are quite close to how I want them to look however I would not be happy submitting this as of right now as I know there is improvements to be made and I need to add prototyping to finish the overall piece.
I got some really good constructive criticism and feedback which I can apply to my work. Some of the small changes which I was given were the make the lines in the background of my graphs more subtle as on the projector they looked quite overpowering and took away from the actual chart despite looking less overpowering on my screen. I am going to change these lines to be a lighter grey just in case they come across different on different screens.
Another small alter which can really improve my dashboard is the navigation bar. To improve this I could make the profile picture a little smaller and add my name below it as a personal touch. This is such a small change which can really help make my dashboard seem a lot more professional. The spacing of the labels could also be approved upon. This is something I had actually been messing around with as it continuously looks off and jumps slightly when changing from page to page. I have already tried fixing this multiple times but I will look at it again!
Finally, something I had also been working on fixing was the spacing between each card and graph and how each page and card of information had different spacing between. I think the best way to do this is easily rebuild my dashboard but focusing even more on spacing by using the grid and grid lines to almost mark out where each card box should sit on the dashboard.
After the critique and taking the advice on board, I started to deconstruct and rebuild my dashboards. I started of not focusing on the prototyping at all as I wanted to focus purely on the spacing, layout and overall how it looked. For me this is so important as if it looks pleasing it helps the usability and increases the people who want to use it.
The main pointers given were about spacing and keeping the layout consistent. Spacing is such a little change which can make so much of a difference. To maintain the correct spacing throughout I used my grid tool and likes to mark out the pages and like them up so that the spacing and layout of each page was somewhat similar. To also help the layout I changed the one outlying page, health to have a bar along the top like all the other pages. This involved a little bit of moving pieces of data around to get a good look and feel for the page. By doing this I had a little extra room which I filled using some data represented using text.
I also took each of my line graphs and bar charts and altered the background lines to look softer and be less noticeable as before they were quite harsh when being displayed on projector at the critique. I hope this small change will help make it look better.
