ACC Dashboard
Role: Visual & Interaction Designer
Duration: Apr 2021- May 2021, 1 month
Tools: Figma
The Brief
The Austin Community College (ACC) Chancellor, Dr. Rhodes, was setting his goals for 2022. Our task was to create a dashboard that visualized key insights into the ACC student population and inform his strategic decisions for the upcoming year.
Project Goals
This was an academic project for my UI design class, so the primary focus was to create a dashboard with different types of charts. However, our professor heavily emphasized the importance for our dashboard to “tell a story” about the student body to Dr. Rhodes. We were provided data that showed basic student enrollment information and a list of Dr. Rhodes’ goals for ACC’s students.
Chancellor’s Goals
The goal that stood out to me the most was to “Reduce Equity Gaps” ensuring students who are part of marginalized groups—such as race and disability— would have the same opportunities for success as their non-marginalized peers. This is something I’m passionate about as well.
For the sake of time, I decided to narrow my scope down to race, as I felt it would provide the most data. However, the design could easily be expanded to other marginalized groups.
How might we design a dashboard that effectively visualizes the ACC student body and their success rates, allowing the Chancellor to easily identify any existing disparities and set more specific goals to better support these groups?
Challenges
The two main obstacles I encountered throughout the project were:
The data provided only showed race enrollment percentages. While this data can show diversity in the student body, it doesn’t reveal how well different groups are succeeding once enrolled. Additionally, ACC’s race enrollment percentages closely mirror the racial demographics of Austin, meaning that this data alone wouldn’t give the chancellor much insight.
Ideally, I would have been able to consult with the chancellor to find out the types of data he would look for when making decisions for the student body. However, due to the nature of the project, we didn’t have that opportunity, leaving me uncertain about what data would be most useful for Dr. Rhodes.
Trying to find the data
Because the information provided wasn’t sufficient, I began researching on my own. The data I found on ACC’s website was full of jargon such as “unduplicated” and “cohort.” These terms, along with numerous acronyms made it difficult to know what this data was measuring and it was overwhelming to sort through.
I also felt very uncertain about what specific information the chancellor would need to make his decisions around equity gaps. As someone who likes getting things right the first time, I got bogged down about including the “right” data.
As a result, I spent too much time trying to find the data that “perfectly” represented what the chancellor wanted and not enough completing the assignment.
As the deadline rapidly approached, I realized I needed to be ok with ambiguity and move forward with the information I already had.
Finding the data
After sorting through the vast amounts of data I accumulated, and looking up the different terms I didn’t understand, I narrowed it down to these 5 graphs, which I thought closely represented the race to success rate of the student body.
Now that I had the charts I wanted, it was time to move on to the visual design.
Final Design
In the end, I created a flexible design that showed the success rates between the different racial groups of students.
Student Dashboard
The main dashboard gives the Chancellor the ability to compare and contrast data for different races and spot discrepancies.
Hovering over or clicking on the pieces of the total percentage pie chart will highlight the specific race values in the other charts. Thought the spotlight would be a great way to narrow the focus to one specific race.
Campus Map
The Campus Map tab features an animated bubble chart to show the location, headcount, and the breakdown of race by campus.
Selecting a bubble triggers a side panel that shows the basic campus information such as name and address, the head count, and also includes the race percentages for that particular campus.
Next Steps
The next step for this would be to present my design to the Chancellor and discuss what kind of information he needs for decision-making and adjust based on that input. However, here are a few ideas for future expansion:
Add more campus-specific information to the campus maps tab, such as success rates or available.
Include data from other marginalized groups, such as disability.
Incorporate faculty data to measure student-faculty ratio and faculty representation.
Takeaways
The main lessons I took away from this project include:
Balancing between attention to detail and meeting the deadline. While I believe that the additional research I did made my design more thoughtful, I got too caught up in finer details and having “correct” information, that it ironically hindered the progress of my project.
Navigating through ambiguity. I didn’t have access to all the information I needed, so I had to move forward and make decisions without knowing everything.
Designing a flexible layout that allows for easy updates and future iterations. Dashboards are meant to be dynamic in design, meaning that even if I had the “incorrect” information, I would still be able to be easily switched out in future iterations.
