The School of Continuous Improvement's Impact Report 2021–2026 sets out what its visual analytics program learned by sitting beside the people who read its charts.
Five years of reading sessions with collaborators, and a self-measurement wall reduced from 212 tiles to 38
The Living Dashboard, the School of Continuous Improvement’s always-on self-measurement wall, is a good deal smaller than it was. The School’s Impact Report 2021–2026, published today, gives the figure as 174 tiles retired and presents it among its achievements.
The report was prepared by Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard, with Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Living Dashboard, and Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter. It mobilises 1,316 reading sessions, in which collaborators read a chart of their own aloud and marked in pencil where they looked, across three accounts titled Reading before building, The axis is a decision and Charts that are looked after.
People have been generous about letting us watch them look at things. We would like to go on doing it, and on balance we think they would rather be told.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
Each account anchors a setting that a collaborator changed and kept to a practice the School then adopted at home: a legend moved to a doorway, an initialled sentence beside an axis, a card naming the reader of each screen. An observer’s tally of 6,204 glances at the wall underpins the report’s finding that it is read chiefly at lunchtime.
Slop University is content to be judged on a report whose headline figure is a subtraction. Dr Hanke said the School “now has a clearer sense of who its charts are for, which in several cases turned out to be a named individual”.
The full report is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.s4w3li.