https://www.caschooldashboard.org/#/Details/43696664337200/1/EquityReport
The California Department of Education publishes performance numbers on schools statewide including suspensions, test scores, and graduation rate. This data is publicly available at this link: https://www.caschooldashboard.org/#/Home . According to the small print on the main page the data is maintained every semester, however making the visualizations and cadence of data more of a scorecard instead of a dashboard.
Some of the topics do appear to require some knowledge of the education system or at least prior knowledge or research. There do seem to be some assumptions that the audience is familiar with the education system either as an educator, someone working in the school system, or a parent.
What I liked
There wasn’t a whole lot to like here from a visual and usability stand point, however it did help to have words – “low”, “very low”, etc to indicate how something ranked relative to what the expectation was (especially when an average user might not be able to recognize the performance level if they are just looking at a number in a chart). There are also multiple tabs to separate metric and score card groups so they are not all grouped together as different users may be interested in different sets of metrics at different times.
What I didn’t like
This does serve the function of a true score card. It shows performance at individual schools for a given time period. It even will say what performance is like for a certain attribute, measuring it against some sort of benchmark (although what that value is or why it was chosen is not [[disclosed—it may be in small print that is hard to find).
Several metrics are displayed as icons which represent a pre defined scale (small pie chart icons). This seems misleading because it is hard to tell if you are supposed to try to read the icon for a value or if they are just supposed to be an indicator icon.
As I experimented more and more with the tabs I realized that there was an extra layer of options in the detailed reports that was hard to see until further investigated.
How I would improve it
If I were to change this I would do the following:
- Highlight what the high level goal is of the school should be, what they should want to achieve for each tab so the user has a starting point for viewing the data. There is the assumption that the user knows something about the world that the data is from, but the author can frame where the data is coming from to help put users from various ranges of knowledge on the same page before jumping into analysis.
- Call out and communicate to the user what the benchmarks are and how they were calculated (can be in a separate chart)
- Simplify the icons used as indicators – the current use of color is good, but the icons cannot themselves be a chart type unless they are meant to be a chart, it can cause confusion. Use an icon type that is solely an icon.
The dashboard is in link form: https://www.caschooldashboard.org/#/Details/43696664337200/1/EquityReport
As images were unable to be posted in this bloghttps://www.caschooldashboard.org/#/Details/43696664337200/1/EquityReport