[bksvol-discuss] Re: Really technical
- From: "Andy B." <sonfire11@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2010 20:09:28 -0400
>LOL! Chela, I promise you and all volunteers, nobody is going to need to
become a CIO, and SQL-whiz, a DB Admin...
Although it would be quite fun to be an SQL wiz, a DBA, a CIO or a web
design consultant for bookshare... Just don't think I would fit their
qualifications for it [I don't have any college degree] or did design for
any notable companies.
>Kim, in a car a dashboard is a bit of attractively molded plastic that
hides the tangle of wires and the spots of grease
>behind it. Online it's a an attractively designed page that hides lots of
thought, and an alphabet soup of jargon, about
>how to make the user's job as simple as possible.
>
>Andy nailed it earlier, "Sign into bookshare, go to the My Account link and
you have a simple basic dashboard."
And they can be quite complex too. I'm in the middle of designing a website
that isn't quite as large as bookshare but isn't small either. It has a top
level dashboard with lots of sub level dashboards under it. These other
dashboards have other sub level dashboards under them as well. Just don't
let the term dashboard or what it does throw you off. It would probably be
better and more user friendly to call it a control panel. In UI design and
the research I have done for usability on the website I work on, it is
always best to keep the control panel as simple and as single "minded" as
possible. This is why I recommended it be modular in design with each module
keeping to a single focus. Here is an example.
When you sign into bookshare and go to the my account section, you have a
top level control panel. It lists all parts of your bookshare account:
1. Personal info like username, email address, password and contact info.
2. Student status if any
3. subscription status/level if any
4. Volunteer status
5. account history which lists the books you downloaded to date.
6. payments if any
7. Proof of disability
and so on. If possible, we will call this the "my account control panel".
This control panel has the "modules" listed above plugged into it. When you
click on one of the links for any section above, there is info and most
likely some settings you can change. These could be classified as control
panels themselves. If you look at it from this point of view, the entire
bookshare website could be classified as one very huge mega control
panel/dashboard. It just doesn't sound fun, friendly or normal to do this.
For most people, this is why dashboard or control panel is always left out
when talking about web design and application development. Well, for the
most part. You have directions in some websites or software that will say
something like "To access [whatever], sign in, go to the "settings control
panel" and [do whatever]". I think the term dashboard/control panel has been
stereo typed to make people think that either:
1. It is some huge foreign concept they have to learn,
2. Only related to settings in some application somewhere or
3. Is very hard to use.
Everybody, every day, uses a dashboard or control panel even if you aren't
aware of it. Some of the better designed ones make it so you can't really
tell or think about it. Some of the more ill designed ones will make it
obvious that this is what you are doing. Either way, I don't intend on
bogging everybody down with lengthly descriptions of dashboards/control
panels and get into modules or modular design but thought I would give a
basic idea of what this idea is about. On the other hand, if anybody
wants/needs to know more about it, let me know.
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