It’s too bad we can’t create nice little interactive dashboards to support all of our work. You know, as a way to kind of pull everything together and make our team’s (and client’s) lives just a little bit simpler.
Especially in those early planning days, where we see lots of little iterations. Wouldn’t that be neat?
The Problem
It’s always easier to fully engage a group when you can look them in the eyes. Unfortunately, that’s not always an option. Most of the time the best you can do is an in-person meeting or retreat every once in awhile with email/phone tag in between.
The challenge is in keeping the momentum moving forward between live sessions without putting all the work on the shoulders of a smaller subset of people. Or worse, letting any progress fade away until the next time you meet in person.
The Concept
If we can make engagement in the planning process as simple as possible, more people will remain engaged.
By using a prototyping tool, we can quickly create interactive dashboards out of any image or set of images, including hand drawn. This means we can quickly change out our dashboard interface at a moments notice, changing the emphasis or focus based on the task at hand.
You could even have different stakeholders draw out their ideal dashboard, then quickly bring their ideal to life.
By focusing on encouraging the development of visual artifacts by stakeholders, interactive environments can be quickly stitched together. Since the tools are specifically designed for iterative development they are easy to alter and also comment-mode ready.
The Prototype
Here is a link to the live prototype. Click around a little at the top of the page, see where it takes you.
I’m using this to show how the hand drawn dashboard would work during the evaluation planning process. But there are lots of opportunities to use this approach.
Thoughts?
What do you think? Leave me a reply and let me know.
Have a project that could use a little simple easy to implement hand drawn organization? Let’s talk.
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