Our second project consists of creating a dashboard that will showcase a week in our own life. This project will showcase and improve our diagrammatic skills.

Master Apprentice

Before starting this new project I did another master apprentice exercise, similar to how I had done previously when creating the music app. In many of the previous master apprentices exercises I had not copied the designs exactly as they had been as I tried to focus more on learning about how layout and elements were placed in a screen. However, this is not something I focus on this time, and so I tried to copy the design as close as I could to the original. In the images below there are two types of bar charts that I copied. Although, I now see a few inaccuracies such as the colour of parts of the text, alignment of text, and the roundness of the bars, but for the most part I think that I was able to create a successful replica of these designs. I was also able to very easily match the correct font that they had used in these designs, which I found very impressive as I had not been able to do so in previous exercises without the help of online tools.

I found this master apprentice exercise helpful to see different examples of how data is presented in an simple way. However, I have never created a visualisation of data, and even though I am aware that there will be many implications of measurements that have to be calculated to create illustrations for a dashboard, I am really uncertain about how to do so or even how to begin.

Sketches

To begin the project, I did a few sketches of how my dashboard could look like, including many sketches of the overview and of the different sections that would expand when interacting with it. In the sketches shown in the images below, there is a range of sections that I thought of including in the dashboard such as steps, sleep, and heart-rate. Which are things that I have been able to track over the past week. I want to include an additional section, but I am very uncertain of what to include as I would like this to be fitting within the rest of the things that I have tracked, which are all health related. I was suggested to include calories that I have burnt throughout the day, however this would be a very difficult thing to track.

Colour Palette

Colour is the next thing that I looked into before moving into designing the dashboard digitally. I originally planned to use red/pink tones for the dashboard as I liked these colours, but after using them in the actual design it reminded me of the colours that a menstruation app would have, so I decided to change them to something different as this was not the mood I was going for.

Below is another two options of colours that I had in mind, although after trying them out in the design, I thought that the second colour palette with the pink and orange was too much and I thought it could be too overpowering to the viewer to look at a whole dashboard of this colour. Therefore, I decided to use some darker colours like the blue colours shown below. The very light green and pink will be used as accent colours and for the text as I think that they stand out the most.

On week ten, feedback was provided about my dashboard and my tutor pointed out that the colours of the dashboard did not meet the contrast requirements. This means that the pink and the green that I have used as text is not legible enough, so I would need to change everything to a new colour.