check out dashboard and provide feedback

[leahbannon]

18f.gsa.gov/dashboard

Open thread! Share your thoughts here!

• What are you interested in learning about 18F?
• Does dashboard provide that?
• Is it easy to find?
• What is confusing about dashboard?

[coryamanda]

Looks really cool, but I did have a few suggestions.

• Sort the links on the main page by category (not sure how they're sorted now)
• When I click the link, I expect it to go to the projects rather than the definitions
• It'd be helpful to have a Q&A setup for the individual project pages. What are we building? Why are we building it? What is the problem we're solving?
• Organize the language in the project definitions around users, right now "you" refers to developers not to the users. It's a linguistic thing, but as a user it makes me feel like I'm not the intended audience.

[meiqimichelle]

Good points! Thanks very much for the feedback! Keep it comin' if you think of anything else.

[TaniaUllah]

Comments on the dashboard webpage:

• It took some time for me to realize the numbers indicated the # of projects in each phase.
• Clicking "discovery", "alpha", "beta", "live" should lead to the the list of projects
• Liked the "code" "metrics" "news" sections.

[elainekamlley]

Working with a group of women here at the hackathon. Some feedback they had:

• Many feel like having more visualization of where each project would be more clear - like a progress bar
• Ditto to clicking on a phase should lead to a list of projects in under each stage
• A link to project stage definitions separate from the boxes.
• A search bar under phases could be useful for a user who wants to go straight to a project that interests them. Especially as the number of projects increase
• When on a specific project page have a progress status bar or sign posting

They are coming back later this afternoon, I'll see if they have any addition feedback.

[gboone]

Thank you! This is excellent feedback so far. Keep it coming!

[shawnbot]

First day on the job here, and I've got some thoughts:

First off, project sort order is important and will become even more so as the list grows. Alphabetical or by phase seems to make the most sense to me, and being able to sort by either would be really nice.

Having a more visual representation of progress would be nice, assuming that it's possible to quantitatively determine a project's progress. (In terms of... what? Budget, time, feature/issue completeness on GitHub)? And if we can't get any more granular with progress, could we at least consider a 4-step continuous color scheme instead of distinct primary colors for each? For instance, ColorBrewer has great sequential 4-step color schemes, e.g.:

As for the phase legend at the top, I think it'd be great for those phases to also indicate how many projects are in each. This might serve as one good indicator of overall team "health" (in the sense that we probably don't ever want to be too heavy on one end of the phase scale, right?).

I found the "Metrics" link confusing: because the icon is a chart, I expected to see something visual on the project pages they link to. So either the link text and/or icon aren't quite right, or the project pages need to surface some actual metrics above the fold. Maybe there's some room for a GitHub-style contribution graph here (which would give people a sense of whether it's being actively worked on, separately from phase), or some other visual indicator like a GitHub issue progress bar (not just open issues, but open v. closed)?

[leahbannon]

@shawnbot great feedback, thanks. :) couple questions:

could we at least consider a 4-step continuous color scheme instead of distinct primary colors for each

I like that color scheme, but would the first yellowish color be too pale for the white font on top of it?

As for the phase legend at the top, I think it'd be great for those phases to also indicate how many projects are in each.

Totally agree; that's actually what those numbers represent. However, nobody I talk to seems to understand that's what the numbers mean. Any ideas on how to convey that without cluttering?

I found the "Metrics" link confusing: because the icon is a chart, I expected to see something visual on the project pages they link to.

Had planned to add Google Analytics, etc., but might just change this until we get that in there.

[shawnbot]

Ah yes, color contrast! Let me do a little experimentation in Sketch (@noahmanger tipped me off to this plugin) and see if I can find or make one that works. I could even whip up an HTML example with some text on top for reference.

Re: project counts, how about turning that into a really simple bar chart? Vertical or horizontal could work, though it would probably need to collapse to horizontal (bars growing from left to right, one per line) on mobile. I can comp this up too.

Google Analytics would be awesome. Are we considering showing visitor counts over time publicly?

[philipashlock]

Looks pretty great. I think there could be a bit more context for when someone clicks a link directly to a project page without ever visiting the frontpage. When you go directly to a project page, there's not much of a header or branding indicating what the site is and I think the label that indicates the discovery/alpha/beta/live stage could use more explanation and emphasis here as well.

[wslack]

I think a link to alpha site versions would be helpful (like the MyRA site). The Project Stage Definitions has some unused whitespace and could be more dense, or perhaps make use of an icon to represent status.

However, nobody I talk to seems to understand that's what the numbers mean. Any ideas on how to convey that without cluttering?

I think something like the below would work, maybe with a vertical orientation for smaller width screens?