Design vs Presentational Tool

[merryman]

This is a fundamental question that will dictate how we are going to evolve the Galyleo Dashboard Studio Tool in the future. Put bluntly, this means wether or not studio should enable and support the workflows like something like figma does: Or if we envision studio to be a mainly presentational tool, that is supposed to enable people to quickly assemble dashboards that look nice and convey the information they want. In that case we should analyse tools of the kind of pitch.io and steal a lot of ideas from them:

[merryman]

I will go first and state what I think about this issue. While I dont understand the userbase or can think of any workflow I would want to do in a dashboard editor, I got to observe what @rickmcgeer and the people he mentions do on a regular basis. So think this is still somewhat of an educated guess. What I see is that we never talk about the design of a dashboard at all. What that means to me is, that nowhere in our discussions about studio have we ever talked about themes, colorschemes, design systems or the like. It was always a purely data driven workflow that starts from the jupyter notebook, moves over to something that more and more has cristalized to be pandas and finally ending in pre-canned sets of widgets and graphs that allow the user to interact and inspect the data presented in the dashboard. So my takeaway from that is, that all that studio really is, is a presentational tool much more like what pitch.io tries to achieve. What I expect therefore from studio is that I do not want to think about how I can and should design a dashboard that looks great. I want this to come out of the box. I want studio for me to make it effortless to choose nice looking color themes and proportionally sizes fonts. Looking at pitch.io we can get some ideas how that is to be done. All configurations of a user element align next to that selected element, similar to a halo. Sizing options for fonts, borders follow a power-2 based system where a user can easily choose from 2,4,8,16 etc which makes the whole design look more harmonious.

What I would vouch for: Make lively.next more like figma. Turn studio into something more like pitch.io.

[rickmcgeer]

I agree with @merryman. Our user base wants to have beautiful-looking dashboards, but don't have the skillset (and don't want to put in the time that someone like @mahdibiazi does) to create them. Any presentation tool offers themes and templates to make creating great-looking presentations easy. In my experience, the dashboard creator should be thought of as similar to a PowerPoint slidemaker; they'll use a nice-looking template if one exists (and will search for a good one) and within that template will play with stuff to make it look as nice as possible; they won't design templates, choose fonts, colors, etc. Rather, they'll expect a designer to have done that for them. pitch.io caters exactly to this: we want a great-looking presentation, we don't want to build one. Canva does the same thing. Come to that, Facebook offers background and themes for memes.

[rickmcgeer]

Transfer to Jira