WTA #01 – Thinking about the Dashboard

Drafted a visual design, a revamp on the colors and thought Space Grotesk for the typography would make the UI pop more. More importantly I started pondering about the dashboard users would land on upon opening the app.

Having a few reference websites for economic event calendars, I took notice of a commonality in theme: the dates. Below is the top section of fxdaily.com. It’s interesting to see a visual representation on the number of events and their impact color, both on the top bar/ We also have filters for timezone, country/region, and importance. If you take a closer look at the calendar itself, figure on the right, you’ll notice the color coded circles below the dates indicating the impact on the events. I remember listening about how people look for high impact events as they affect the prices more in stocks and everything related around it.

I also downloaded an economic event calendar app called FX Calendar, and one function that grabbed my attention was of course the calendar. And it makes perfect sense that picking dates and having time-related data organization is on the top of the web apps and apps as it pertains to the Calendar part.

What I particular liked about the app was that the top weekly timeline expanded into a monthly calendar. A bit different from most app designs where a button would lead to a calendar modal popping up mostly from the bottom.

If you’ve used Todoist, calendars are show in a weekly basis for most apps and a click on the month name with the arrow will open up the separate calendar modal.

I sketched out the calendars for those apps as I wanted to explore what type of date picking option would feel natural. Also I started organizing thoughts on what were important information within a economic calendar and started making note of the information architecture.

I quickly created a few visuals to help me better understand how many data I was working with and what choices I need to make within the small screen real estate for the dashboard. One initial problem that popped while sketching was the handling of different event dates. For example, how I would determine the hierarchy between Today’s events compared to other dates. Other problems were about categorization of timelines such that of : 7days, yesterday, today, and tomorrow if they were needed or if this was a common practice.

So today was more about finding out more questions. While I feel I won’t be able to answer these questions as I design I’d thought these questions would be great guides for design providing limitations and choices that need to be made for this first iteration.