AQE Dashboard Design

[Pete Correia (Cosm)]

Egg community,

I'm a designer at Cosm and I'm working on the first versions of the Air Quality Egg dashboard.

I've made some initial work, it's still in the VERY early stages but I wanted to get feedback on the progress and do this collaboratively, so let's get the conversation going!

Attached is the current state of the design.

Let me know your thoughts on it!

Thanks everyone!
Pete

[Benjamin Lebsanft]

Hi Pete,

looks awesome! Really great and clean design :)

What I'd like to see is some stock like intra day graphs, weekly graphs
etc. for th measured things, but thats maybe not going into the
dashboard I guess.

Is GMaps essential part of Cosm or is a OSM map also possible?

Thanks for the great work!
Ben

[Pete Correia]

Hi Ben,

thanks for replying, glad you like how it's looking!

For the common citizen, I'm thinking graphs may not be necessary on the dashboard as you need to understand what you're actually looking at and they don't make it that quick & easy to answer the simple questions most people will have.

In any case, they will be available in the respective Cosm feed page (the regular feed page we have for all feeds) for the people that want a more precise, scientific look at the data. We should have a link somewhere.

Instead I tried to come up with color coded index bands and gauges so that even the most clueless of users could understand as much as possible.

Let's discuss this.

About the maps, we can OSM and it is all going to be open sourced, people will be able to pull request even.

Thanks,

Pete

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Pete Correia

Sent with Sparrow

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[Félix Pedrera García]

Hi Pete and everybody,

I like very much the design, and agree that for the common citizen graphs are not needed.

To be more meaningful, I would also add some icons representing non recommended activities when a pollutant level is high: For example: outdoor aeorobic sports not recommended, or better not going for a walk with the baby, or extra care for asthmatics. These warnings can be assessed from the known health effects of the measured pollutants and could help people to understand the risks better than just an air quality index.

Regards,

--
Félix.

2012/9/4 Pete Correia <pe...@petecorreia.com>

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[Pete Correia]

Hi Félix,

That's a great idea and exactly the kind of approach I'm leaning to. I'll explore that in the next iterations.

Thanks,

Pete

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[Liz Barry]

+1 on OpenStreetMap!

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[Kyle Gordon]

Likewise, the dashboard looks awesome! But +1 on an openstreetmap map instead

Cheers

Kyle

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Kyle Gordon - 2M1DIQ
Web: http://lodge.glasgownet.com
Jabber/Email/SIP: ky...@lodge.glasgownet.com

[Pete Correia]

I'm all for OpenStreetMap, the google map was mainly a placeholder example for a map.

Rajesh, I'm not sure if it's going to be averages or point deviations, I'm not the right person to expand on that. Which do you think would be better / useful?

Also, do you think there's a strong use case for the last hour?

Pete

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Pete Correia

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[Luis Fraguada]

Besides giving us a warm fuzzy feeling, is there any technical advantage to using OSM vs GMaps? I use both in professional development and I find implementing one or the other to be just about the same amount of work for about the same result...

Luis

[Usman Haque]

> add some icons

> For example: outdoor aeorobic sports not recommended, or better not going for a walk with the baby, or extra care for asthmatics.

i'm not sure i agree with this, for all sorts of reasons:

- these are the kinds of things that the numbers, represented as simple conversion factors to icons, just cannot tell us
- it doesn't help people who don't know how to read the numbers get any better at understanding the numbers (which would mean needing to learn the far more important roles of context, history, and using nuance in reading data)
- it emphasises the negative consequences of bad air quality, rather than giving people a reason to change their own situation, or do things that would improve air quality; so there's no incentive to change, and no way to monitor possible improvement.

i'm not saying that numbers or graphs are better, but rather that the idea of a "common citizen" who cannot understand numbers but can read icons, is a bit of a dangerous myth.

it would be far better, imho, to say "here is a list of recommended places for doing aerobics today" rather than attempting to claim "you shouldn't do aerobic exercises at this particular location today".

usman

[David Holstius]

Yes, it's a good-looking design!

I have to say, I agree with Usman.

The other thing I'd note is there's no obvious answer to the question with regard to "Low" or "Moderate" CO/NO2---low or moderate compared to what?

For what it's worth, I've been involved with a group that reports biomonitoring (blood samples) results back to study participants, who are not scientists nor experts in chemical regulation. They've had to grapple with a lot of these same communication design issues when designing personalized report packets. I'll see if I can dig up something informative to post about that work.

David

[Adam Laskowitz]

Something we are working on with visualizations in regards to "low" "moderate" "high" levels are taking z-scores of an historical data set. Then at any given moment you can look to see if the AQ is low,moderate,or high related to what it "normally" is. This is not the best thing to do, but it gives a GENERAL idea as to how the AQ relates to its normal (average) readings, and it also allows us to compare eggs to each other and see if different zones are high or low. This is useful because can then look at trends over a given area (geographic space).

[Matthew Kime]

I'm just joining the conversation so apologies if my question is repetitive -

where will the dashboard live? how will the user log into it?

--matt

[Joseph Saavedra]

Hello AQErs!

We'll be having a big ol' google hangout, this Saturday Nov 17 from 3 - 415pm, eastern standard time.

Please add/follow Air Quality Egg on Google Plus, and we'll have the hangout through there. It'll also be broadcast live and recorded and posted for future reference.

Here's the tentative agenda:

- 10 min: walkthrough of unboxing and plugging in a sensor for the first time, then registering it on airqualityegg.com

- 10 min: landing on the egg feed page through the site dashboard, we'll share the link and discuss quickly any immediate feedback.

- 20 min: discussing capabilities/technical specs of the sensor shield, walkthrough of the EggBus library, how to add I2C sensors, hackability, etc

- 15 min: updates on hardware and enclosure manufacturing and delivery, updates on current and upcoming projects and events, etc.

- 15 min: question/answer/suggestion/idea time!

I realize that's quite a bit to go over, but having it documented as well as getting feedback and answering your questions will be super helpful for everyone, I believe.

If there are more instructions needed, look out for them 15 minutes before the hangout, posted on the Air Quality Egg page on Google Plus.

Thanks all, looking forward to talking!

joe + AQE team

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Joseph Saavedra
Technologist, Developer

http://sensemake.rs
http://jos.ph

Assistant Professor, Media Design
School of Art, Media, and Technology
Parsons the New School for Design

New York, NY

[Matthew Kime]

Is there a github project?

...just trying to assess the state of the project.