Visualization

Challenge

I work in the design department at an educational startup which works on providing  counselling services for students who plan to study abroad in a good university of  their choice.My task is to create a dashboard for internal purposes that is to be  used by our counsellors for keeping a track of students enrolled for counselling  services and providing those students with the services to get admission at their  desired universities.The project timeline is 3 months and the solution includes an  even distribution of working hours amongst the design and development teams.We  will focus on trying to uncover what our team members and stakeholders consider  to be the proper flow of the dashboard along with the utilities and services to be  included in it.

Selection

I have used the visualization tool in order to fully understand the flow of the  dashboard.A discussion in this phase will allow all the stakeholders to share their  inputs with each other during the process of defining the scope,boundaries,key  elements and relationships between elements to consider while identifying pain  points and opportunities for improvements or solutions.

Application

I start the process by gathering all data required to fully understand the problem.I  will draw from existing material available to understand it.The existing material  includes historical data of students enrolled for counselling,references of  dashboards used in different industries.Also I conduct informal interviews with  one-three of the stakeholders who serve as my main points of contact for this  project.The stakeholders will be divided in terms of roles such as  developers,managers and counselors.Each of them will be shown a visual that  depicts the flow and fuctionality of the dashboard according to my knowledge and

understanding.The stakeholders can review and comment upon the shortcomings  and improvements needed.I record these findings and create a view that combines  the shared and new insights from the group discussion and then create a revised  visual that incorporates their feedback and proposed changes that they agreed to  as a group.

Insight

The main importance of this exercise was to gain valuable feedback from different  stakeholders and to reinforce their understanding of the problem we are working  upon.They can more quickly gain new insights about relationships between key  entities instead of taking time to identify them. Also it helps them to identify what  they don’t know, in what areas they need to obtain information or data to provide  the values for the variables involved.

Approach

The current approach involves drawing a visual using pen and a notebook and then  discussing with different stakeholders and joting down their insights and  understandings of the problem.This is good for reference but not that good for  collaboration as some of the stakeholders wanted access to the visual anytime.So  a different approach can involve creating a visual digitally and then sharing it across  all stakeholders who then can share their insights in the form of comments and  drawings.This can help in easier collaboration among all and keep a track of the  different insights and problems uncovered by the respective stakeholders.For this  a tool like Whimsical(https://whimsical.com/) can be used.

