How User-Centred Design Can Transform University Civic Activity with Data-Driven Dashboards

Blog Series: How User-Centred Design Can Transform University Civic Activity with Data-Driven Dashboards

By Adira Andlay and Jess Redmond, senior researchers at the Institute for Community Studies at The Young Foundation

Action without insight will go quickly awry. Data-driven approaches are therefore essential for a civic university trying to make an impact in local communities. Yet finding data to understand university impact can feel like searching in the dark. Mechanisms to understand how students and staff feel about university activities may be well known, but mechanisms to hear from local communities tend to be underexplored. So how can universities understand their civic impact in place?

This blog series intends to shine a light in that darkness. It will explore how the National Civic Impact Accelerator and Institute for Community Studies (ICS) co-designed dashboards with universities to support their civic activities, starting with a ‘Civic Impact’ dashboard. We are committed to working openly, sharing our User Centred Design journey to develop inclusive and accessible data-driven approaches for greater social impact.

A ‘dashboard’ is attractive because can condense and visualise a wide range of data to support decision making. However, dashboards without a clear purpose or understanding of their users can distort, rather than clarify, information. While dashboards appeal because interpreting visuals feels simpler than wading through numbers, data that appears intuitive in a chart may in reality be messy and complex.[1] For example, HESA university data has well-documented issues with data quality, caused by challenging data collection processes, and a reluctance of universities to sharing data for fear of looking bad.[2]^,[3]

Figure 1 An example of a ‘dashboard’ for understanding the civic impact of universities – City-REDI’s Civic Impact Index.

A deeper challenge is that dashboards, as well as communicating information, shape our understanding of how the world works.[4] If not paired with good data literacy, a dashboard may give its users a distorted impression of control or certainty. Civic universities must aim to create shared understanding and activity with local stakeholders, not act as a distant and powerful ‘mission control’.[5] A lack of clear purpose or cross-purposes can also produce dashboards without a clear ‘use’.[6] Dashboards which are not helpful are not used – and dashboards which are not used are subsequently not maintained, worsening data quality issues.

Despite these challenges, the need for accessible data on university civic impact remains. To address the challenges described above, the ICS are adopting a User Centred Design (UCD) ethos. UCD is an iterative design process in which designers focus on the users and their needs in each phase of the project development. In UCD, design teams involve users throughout the design process to create highly usable and accessible products.[7] This relies on developing an understanding of what dashboard users need in terms of accessibility, scenarios where the dashboards would be used, and the user’s full experience of the dashboard.

Figure 2 A snapshot from our approach and framework for the project, based on The Interaction Design Foundation’s User-Centred Design Methodology

By understanding the scenarios a dashboard will be used for, we aim to ensure we are deliberate about how the university sector uses its data, with recognition of data limitations. We will be building on the excellent work conducted by City-REDI for their Civic Impact Index, and the ICS’s technical expertise in UCD to build a product that university staff can use to advocate for and understand their civic impact.

UCD requires proper investment in technical skills, staff resources and time. This blog series on the dashboard development aims to spread this investment by sharing our learnings and reflections on how to apply UCD principles to dashboard development. Prototype versions of the Civic Impact Dashboard will be tested with a smaller user testing group over the next few months, in advance of an alpha version released at the end of this year. To keep an eye on and learn with us, subscribe to this blog and follow ICS socials at @icstudiesuk for regular updates.

Written by:

Jessica Redmond, Senior Researcher at The Institute of Community Studies
Adira Andlay, Senior Researcher at The Young Foundation

[1] Wagner, I. (2023) Are data dashboards vanity projects?, Medium. Available at: https://uxdesign.cc/are-data-dashboards-vanity-projects-e19929bb1c41 (Accessed: 6 August 2024).

[2] Desourdy, C. and Richmond, L. (2023) HESA Data Futures: the data quality challenge. Available at: https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/services/risk-advisory/blogs/2023/hesa-data-futures-the-data-quality-challenge.html (Accessed: 6 August 2024).

[3] MacDonald, E. (2022) Launch of the Civic Index, City-REDI Blog. Available at: https://blog.bham.ac.uk/cityredi/launch-of-the-civic-index/ (Accessed: 6 August 2024).

[4] See Sadowski, J. (2021) ‘“Anyway, the dashboard is dead”: On trying to build urban informatics’, New Media & Society [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211058455.

[5] See Mattern, S. (2015) ‘Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard’, Places Journal [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.22269/150309.

[6] This is a huge problem in local government. See Abazajian, K. (2024) A dashboard by any other name. Available at: https://www.civicsource.info/p/a-dashboard-by-any-other-name (Accessed: 5 August 2024).

[7] What is User Centered Design (UCD)? — updated 2024, The Interaction Design Foundation. Available at: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/user-centered-design (Accessed: 8 August 2024).