Dashboard week is underway and it is Day 2 already.

Today we were tasked with developing an existing dashboard to be more user accessible. My task specifically was focused around a TIL official sales dashboard of licenses. The dashboard had to be altered to accommodate Olu, The Neurodiverse Salesperson, an individual who struggled with Dyscalculia. Which is basically the mathematics equivalent of Dyslexia. For data sensitivity reasons I cannot share my dashboard with you but I will discuss some of the changes I made and any challenges I encountered.

Changes

• Where possible I abbreviated 000's to K's and M's denoting thousands and millions. It was also important to include commas in figures where they weren't already.
• Removed labels on a running total line chart which showed the final total of each line. Replaced with a tool tip which decluttered the graph and made each figure bigger and easier to read.
• In tables containing numbers I changed  them to a heatmap visualisation. Now the user can easily identify the high values without reading.
• The main focus of the original dashboard was 8 bar charts stacked on top each other showing 8 different metrics to display the total sales for each one. This was difficult to read and interpret for any user, let alone one with Dyscalculia. Reorganising the containers I allowed more room for this graph, but with the use of a parameter I used a chart switch solution allowing the user to filter to one metric at a time.

Challenges

• The main challenge I discovered was understanding the needs of a user with Dyscalculia. The definition can be quite vague in how someone would interpret different elements of a dashboard.
• In the task brief it was important to develop the dashboard for this condition but also to maintain it's functionality for all employees. Therefore, it was a challenge to keep the concepts of existing graphs and add the required level of accessibility without starting from scratch. This was particularly an issue when dealing with tables.