“Smart city” is no more a buzzword. With the advancement in technologies and devices communicating with each other, thereby generating huge volumes of data, we can render insights to help build a smart city. I came across such a smart city dashboard with feeds showing the current health of London.
http://citydashboard.org/
The dashboard shows obvious stuff, like weather information, pollution level and tube status. There is also a feed from twitter showing whats trending in London. There are chunks of other data like the air pollution level and the FTSE index. Now all these data looks good on a 10,000 ft level, but to better understand why this dashboard was conceptualize, we need to ask two important questions:
- What goals are we trying to achieve by measuring all kinds of data?
- What data will be most useful to citizens? And how to cater relevant data to right audiences?
The obvious answer to first question would be to have a common platform which provide its user access to important data. To be successful in its purpose, the portal needs real time feed of data. And I have observed several lags in providing real data feeds. As all these machines produce more data, how do we ensure that it can be readily understood and reused by all audiences.
Now let’s look at the other question. The essence of any dashboard lies in identifying its audiences. If the dashboard is used by the regular commuter, the subway data might be useful. They already know when and which train to catch, so even the running status should work fine; but for a tourist this data is useless. They would seek detail information about the subway service. I am also not sure how the FTSE index will be a good information. Below are some more limitations in the dashboard:
- Too much information are presented in a small space and has ended up looking extremely cluttered and distracting.
- Not all information are relevant to every group of audiences.
- The color theme is quite distracting and serves no real purpose and this draw focus away from the data itself. Aesthetically the dashboard is not pleasing.
- There are so many variations in the visualization style. There are boxes, line chart, temperature widget all in the same place.
- There is no clear focus on any aspect. Audiences are actually seeing a lot of different numbers without getting much insights.
What can be done to make this better:
- Identify what data is relevant and deliver it back to the relevant audience. One way of doing it is by giving the users to customize the dashboard as per their preferences.
- Present some historical trends that could potentially help users when the dashboard is unable to get any live feed.
- Improving the look and feel of the dashboard by using pleasing color, use of uniform visualizations and removal of unnecessary widget.
- There should be a note to state briefly what each component do. This improves the overall usability of the application.
References: https://www.opendatasoft.com/2016/10/05/smart-city-dashboards/
