Municipal Financial Dashboard Redesign for the Massachusetts Department of Revenue
Academic | Individual Project | Fall 2018
Course: HF730 - Data Visualization
Assignment: This was a client-sponsored academic project. The Massachusetts Department of Revenue asked class members to develop redesigns to improve their Municipal Finance Trend Dashboard tool.
The Problem
The Massachusetts Department of Revenue Division of Local Services (DLS) wanted to make the fiscal health data they already collect and compile more easily accessible, so that users can get a better understanding of the fiscal health of their community.
Main Challenges
The primary challenges for this redesign were:
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Coping with the complexity of presenting lots of data in a non-overwhelming manner (DLS collects 57 different data points on fiscal health every year, for each municipality)
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Designing an interface and visualizations that are useful for user groups with very different levels of expertise
SKILLS HIGHLIGHTS:
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Data visualization
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Wireframe design
Users and Their Goals
My design needed to satisfy the needs of two main user groups described by the Commissioner:
Group 1 - The "Excel Jockeys" (Internal Users at MassDLS)
Traits:
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Familiar with data and context
Stated Goals:
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Quickly ID “any trends that make us worried about the financial condition of a community”
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Want to be able to pick data to show at once in order to quickly compile reports
Group 2 - "Joe Public" (External Users)
Traits:
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Unfamiliar with data and context; (public officials, community finance managers, townspeople)
Stated Goals:
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Want to tell a story about the community/prove a point about their town
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Dashboard should educate about how to improve fiscal health and highlight areas with room for improvement
State of Original Dashboard
Pain Point: Users had to navigate back and forth between six different dashboards (below) to access or compare data sets from different categories, which was clumsy and inefficient (and difficult for compiling reports).
Pain Point: The dashboards provided limited to no context or educational information for novice users for understanding the data.
Proposed Design Solutions for New Dashboard
Using information best practices, I created various features that allow users to customize data for their goals, support various user needs, and help manage complexity in the visualization.
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Anatomy of the Revised Dashboard
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Categorical tabs at top of page allow users to explore all data sets in one place (instead of across multiple dashboards as before).
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Top section of the Dashboard tab provides an overview of the town and tells a story through data.
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Bottom section of the Dashboard tab provides more detailed data for in-depth exploration. (Automatically shows key data sets for fiscal health, but can be customized with the "Add to Dashboard" feature).
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Pre-Attentive Processing, Visual Salience, and Ease of Search
The large color difference between the blue and orange colors helps certain data pop and draws attention to important information for achieving user goals.
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Orange colors draw user's attention to important data, such as the Health Rating Overview data, which gives an at-a-glance rating of overall community health.
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Satisfies User Group 1 goal: Quickly ID health of community
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Salient colored labels on charts quickly guide users' attention to areas that need improvement, and consistent color encoding shows at-a-glance ordinal information about whether an area needs improvement.
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Helps User Group 1 and 2 goals: ID worrisome trends; bring users attention to areas that need improvement for education
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Customizability and Flexibility for User Groups
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"Add to Dashboard" feature - can add any chart from any categorical tabs to the main Dashboard page.
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Users no longer need to compare data across different pages as before.
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Allows users to select the data they want to tell their story about the fiscal health of their community; Allows internal users (Group 1) to quickly produce a report by customizing and exporting the Dashboard tab
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"Show/hide explanations" feature provides external users (Group 2) with more information that helps them interpret the displayed data and educates; Internal users (Group 1) can hide information they might not need, to reduce visual clutter.
PROJECT ROLE
As this was an individual academic project, all aspects of the project were my responsibility.
I synthesized information on users and project goals from the sponsor's presentation for the project.
I am fully responsible for feature ideas and visual design of the sketches and wireframes developed for this proof of concept.