Prototype iteration 3

Dan Noyes on

In his last blog post Mark said we would be sharing the latest prototype iterations last week. We have held off with this because this iteration brought up so many points for discussion and revision - it feels like we're touching upon some really important issues. These discussions are still ongoing, so in the spirit of keeping this process open, here is prototype iteration 3:

http://markboultondesign.com/clients/c/cern/public/iteration3/index.html

There is a lot to revise and rework in this, but please do give us your feedback using the comment form below.

Cian and I are currently working with Mark and his team in the studio in the UK. Mark, Alex and Nathan will be back out with us at CERN next week where we'll be meeting with various teams of people from experiments and departments and doing some user testing. Although our schedule is tight, if you and your team would like to meet with us to discuss the project I'll do my best to fit you in to our schedule next week.

Comments

Submitted by David Martin Clavo on Wed 16 Nov 2011

The work on the HTML prototypes and the Design concepts is impressive :) It looks really good. I especially like design concepts 2 and 3. 1 is too black for me; what happened with the one with the wide 3d collision image on top of a grey background?

The dashboard idea is great and looks really good even now.

I just see a problem with the "Raise a ticket" buttons. There are already a lot of different forms for a bunch of different ticket types ; the idea is to speed resolution up by requesting all necessary information to the user from the start. However the form that appears is quite simple and generic...

Should those dialogs be a link to the existing forms? To the Service Portal where the user would search the right form? A search form that would call the Portal search, or maybe redirect to it, and display links to create tickets?

Similar problem for the "book a room" button; the current Indico form is more complex. This button should maybe just redirect to the Indico form?

I know it's still only a proof of concept; I would just like to hear your thoughts my aforementioned concerns... In any case, great work! :)

Submitted by Dan Noyes on Wed 16 Nov 2011

Thanks for your comments and feedback, David.

You are right that the current 'widgets' in the dashboard are too simplistic, and that their respective native applications have much more functionality. At their most basic these widgets could simply be links to applications (such as service-portal/ or indico/), but we'd like to explore a more integrated dashboard where users can do things right there and then without having to 'go' to an application. This would obviously require a lot of work, however. We had a long discussion just this morning on this. We raised questions such as:

  • Should widgets be grouped?
  • Should widgets have 'states' such as 'focus' that would allow us to reveal more functionality?
  • Should widgets simply be links with some teaser info pulled into them?
  • How should widgets and bookmarks be displayed together?
  • How can we enable CERN developers to create their own widgets?
  • ...

So this is still very much early days for the dashboard concept. In terms of Service Portal integration, you and I should perhaps meet up to discuss this specifically so that we can see how much flexibility we have to bring functionality directly into the dashboard. I'll drop you an email about this.

As for your other question: "what happened with the one with the wide 3d collision image on top of a grey background?" We're meeting with the big LHC experiments on Monday to discuss how these events can best be managed. Should we 'curate' 'beautiful' events? Should we just randomly allow events to 'float' to the front page? What do we do when there is no beam? We will also be inviting non-LHC experiments in these discussions soon.

Submitted by Jose Benito Gon... on Fri 18 Nov 2011

 

Hi Dan,

 

Great job! I really like the design and more precisely concepts 1,2 and 3. 

Also I would love to see such a dashboard in production and being able to use it soon :). On the other hand, I agree with David that for some cases as, Indico room booking, we should really consider well what to do, because we risk to duplicate functionality in both systems (as to book a room is more complicated than it looks). Also, it would be a great idea to be able to develop widgets; I would join the developing adding some monitors for Indico status, some charts to follow some services activity and so forth.

I will keep an eye on the blog and provide more feedback.

Congratulations!

Jose

Submitted by Dan Noyes on Mon 21 Nov 2011

Hi Jose,

Thanks for the feedback. The widgets you see in this iteration are very basic placeholders; real examples would need a lot more thought. We need to get a framework in place that allows developers at CERN to develop their own - it would be great to have you and your team contributing Indico widgets.

The basic problem that needs to be addressed first is who would drive and maintain such a framework.

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