Very similar to how my first design for the Industry Overview Dashboard allowed for the rapid development of new products’ own dashboards, my work on version 2 allowed for similar design and development for new products. The Cities Dashboard exemplifies the flexibility of the design.
When Euromonitor International introduced its new Cities coverage product, it needed a dashboard for launch. However, because the geographic coverage was now no longer countries but cities, the traditional map no longer worked. I rejected an initial suggestion to use dots on a map for cities, because the difficulty faced in identifying countries on map would be magnified by having users try to identify cities—many of which would overlap—on a map. Instead, the first change was to drop the map entirely.
Without a map, the bar chart and scatterplot took on newfound importance. Due to the confined space of the Flash piece, showing the 800-odd cities became immensely difficult on the bar chart, as bars were reduced to perhaps a pixel’s width. Consequently the change geographies panel took on some of its own newfound importance. Unfortunately the geography list was an alphabetical presentation of the cities covered, but the data did not include to which country a city belonged. Therefore I added a list where cities were assigned to their parent country to help users looking to explore cities within a target market.
To alleviate the aforementioned issue of displaying 800 data points in the bar chart and scatterplot, we removed the regional aggregates. That allowed us to make better use of the highlight geography feature. It could be left open to allow the user to cycle through cities of different regions and organisations.
The default view shows categories for as many as 800 cities, with growth rates and per capita values selectable when available
The second list of cities, grouped by parent country, made the list of hundreds of cities far more usable
Removing the regional aggregates allowed us to keep the highlight cities function permanently visible to make it easier to find clusters of cities