My typical design steps for dashboards or any other type of user interface are:

1) Understand the User Requirements

2) Survey the landscape of existing design solutions to identify best practices

3) Explore solutions with low fidelity mockups

4) Wireframe scenarios for user feedback

5) Create high fidelity interactive prototypes

6) Iterate through this cycle of envisioning before proceeding to development

Does this methodology work? Yes. Do dashboard design teams follow it? Obviously not! A recent comment by a Dashboard Spy reader rings true – After viewing the collection of executive dashboards at enterprise-dashboard.com, (no easy task – as there are 1000 dashboards there) , the reader stated his reaction bluntly – that, quite simply, the designs of current dashboards are awful.
I believe that this is due to the infancy of the enterprise dashboard. In any technology where mass adoption is just starting to happen, you get an early rush of poorly designed products. However, this is not to say that the majority of dashboards have no value – in fact, I would insist on the opposite. No matter how poorly designed the dashboard, it stilll has value – even if it just serves to highlight that some data visualization is wrong or misleading. At least, it is a step in visualizing business intelligence.

What will improve the look and feel of dashboards as they become more popular? Of course there will be pockets of great design in specific custom-built enterprise dashboards. In fact, there are several BI dashboards in the Dashboard Spy collection that are both stunning in visual design and correct in data visualization techniques. However, the mass improvement that we need in dashboard design will be led by improvements in data presentation controls in the commonly available toolsets. Excel, for example, is used by many in their first dashboard projects. The new version of Excel found in Office 2007 will be a mile stone in dashboard design. The look and feel of the graphs, charts, indicators and conditional formatting styles will flavor the design style of dashboards for years to come.

I have the pleasure of illustrating the design process of some of the charts and graphs in the Excel 2007 product by Microsoft. The release of Excel 12 is key to the look and feel of digital dashboards as now there is built in functionality for easy excel dashboarding.

Here we look at the workflow through this series of screenshots. Note: These screenshots all come from the post linked to above and are most likely representative of the Microsoft workflows and design deliverables.

The overall work flow or methodology is illustrated in this image. I am assuming that this must be the standard in place at the Microsoft design center:

This image shows what the designer considered in terms of the existing design solution landscape for charts and graphs. The left side shows existing Office 2003 excel charts. The right side is a collection of high-end custom designed graphics typical of the work ad agencies do for annual reports and other high end uses.

This next image shows an exploration of possible solutions. The idea is to examine extremes and see what is missing or what is extraneous when it comes to an Excel chart:

This next image is precious and should be familiar to anyone who has struggled with designing dashboards. I love paper-based sketches of user interfaces. They feel so intimate and real:

The next stage is to move into a wireframe prototype. While devoid of final look and feel, the basic structure and layout is represented for user feedback and focus groups:

Next we explore navigation to different screens via interactive mockups:

When most changes are finalized, they create high fidelity mockups such as this one. Note the Excel environment.

How does this design methodology match with yours? I’d say that with a few variations here and there, it is basically the same design cycle that we all go through. Send us some screenshots from your work flow for us to feature.

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 InnovTrn

If  there  are 30 stations between Beijing and Guangzhou, just stopping and accelerating  again at each station will waste both energy and time. A mere

5  min  stop per station (elderly passengers cannot be hurried) will result in a  total loss of 5 min x 30 stations or 2.5 hours of train journey time!

How it works?  

1.  For  those  who  are  boarding  the  train: The passengers at a station embarks  onto to a connector cabin way before the train even arrives at the station.  When  the  train  arrives, it will not stop at all. It just slows down  to  pick up the connector cabin which will move with the train on the roof of the train. While the train is still moving away from the station, those  passengers  will board the train from the connector cabin mounted on the  train's  roof.  After  fully  unloading  all its passengers, the cabin connector  cabin  will  be  moved to the back of the train so that the next batch  of  outgoing  passengers who want to alight at the next station will board the connector cabin at the rear of the train roof.

2.  For  those who are getting off: As stated after fully unloading all its passengers,  the  cabin  connector  cabin  will be moved to the back of the train  so  that the next batch of outgoing passengers who want to alight at the  next  station  will board the connector cabin at the rear of the train roof.  When  the train arrives at the next station, it will simply drop the whole  connector  cabin  at  the  station itself and leave it behind at the station.  The  outgoing  passengers can take their own time to disembark at the  station  while the train had already left. At the same time, the train will  pick  up the incoming embarking passengers on another connector cabin in  the  front  part of the train's roof.

So the train will always drop one connector  cabin  at the rear of its roof and pick up a new connector cabining the front part of the train's roof at each station.

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Most of the world’s eyes are fixed upon the leaders who will congregate at Copenhagen, Denmark from next week onwards with regard to the climate and its change, but while the world leaders are busy discussing on a macro level on methods to save the earth from dying due to over-population and pollution, the working class (that’s us!) need not sit back and do nothing. No sir, we can do our part by spreading the word on various ways to keep the earth green, or if you’re more ambitious, learn more about a real-life project that is currently underway which will utilize renewable wind energy to power electric vehicles. This is currently happening on the small Danish island of Bornholm, where government, academia and industry are working hand-in-hand on an innovative pilot program known as the EDISON Project. The EDISON Project could offer unique technical insights which will go some ways in addressing the challenges of combining renewable energy with EVs.

Copenhagen utility DONG Energy is currently collaborating with regional energy company of Oestkraft, the Technical University of Denmark, Siemens, Eurisco and the Danish Energy Association, and IBM to develop the system. Depending on how far consumers allow them to go, current electric vehicles could rely on the system created to charge their exhausted batteries whenever the wind generates excess power. Needless to say, vehicle charging will be slowed or delayed whenever the wind stops, resulting in reduction of energy production. The main goal behind this is not to save the world in the blink of an eye, but to use this as a model for deploying an estimated 200,000 wind-powered EVs nationwide by 2020. Denmark is certainly on the right track as they’re currently a leader in wind power, churning over 20% of the country’s electric power, with the current goal of doubling that amount. Apart from that, they’re not short on expertise as around half the wind turbines produced worldwide hail from Danish manufacturers.

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The federal stimulus bill, which has provided about $950 million in cash grants in lieu of tax credits to the wind sector since August, helped bring some of the projects back, Alonso says, "But not all."

The association, in its third-quarter market report, says that the wind industry installed 1,649 megawatts of new power capacity in the third quarter — enough to serve the equivalent of more than 480,000 average households.

Through the first nine months of the year, 5,800 megawatts of new wind capacity have been added, it says. For all of last year, 8,500 megawatts were added.

Despite the stimulus money, it's doubtful that the U.S. will hit or surpass 2008 levels this year, says Elizabeth Salerno, the association's director of industry data and analysis. Before the financial crisis hit, 2009 was expected to be a growth year, she says.

A slowdown in announcements of new facilities to manufacture the equipment to generate wind power has also occurred. At this time last year, the U.S. had 36 newly finished or announced facilities. So far this year, there have been 24, Salerno says.

Lack of financing continues to hamper wind-generation projects, Alonso says, but he sees some improvement. The government's stimulus plan has helped raise lender confidence, he says.

In September, the federal government announced a $47.7 million grant for Horizon. It had one of 15 U.S. wind projects to get stimulus funds.

That money enabled Horizon to start construction in September on the second phase of a wind farm in Indiana. That project wasn't scheduled to begin until next year — and may not have begun then — had financing remained tight, Alonso says.

He says it'll be summer before a full rebound, assuming the economy continues to recover.

One big question is whether U.S. lawmakers will pass a national standard calling for increased use of renewable energy, such as wind and solar. If so, Salerno says, that would send a signal to the market that demand for such power would increase, spurring investment.

Two dozen states have set their own standards to increase use of renewable energy. As of the end of last year, wind accounted for 1.25% of U.S. electricity generation, the association says.

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Want easy invention ideas? Dreaming up new products and inventions is fun, and it can be easy too. Try the following two techniques and soon you’ll have a list of new ideas.

Easy Invention Ideas – Start With What’s There

One of the easiest ways to create new ideas for inventions is to look at what already exists and find a way to make it better. You can start with things in your own home. These may even be the most marketable ideas – consider how many new kitchen gadgets are sold every year.

Look at the toaster, for example. How could it be improved, replaced, or the need for it eliminated? You could eliminate the need for it if you designed a stove with a toaster built into it. You could replace it with something like a waffle iron. You could improve it by making it faster, perhaps with a combination toasting element and microwave heater.

Look around the room and pick out any item you see. Imagine how it would be if it was bigger, smaller, faster, slower, or different in some way. As I write this, I am looking at a calculator. I would like to be able to talk to it. I could just say, "Mortgage payment, $140,000 loan, fifteen-year amortization, six point five percent interest rate," and it would announce, "$1219.56 per month." With all the latest voice-recognition technology out there, this is possible.

Want an easy way to create a lot of new invention ideas fast? Make a list of everything in your house. Then work your way down the list, thinking of some way to improve or re-invent each item. If nothing comes to mind, move on to the next item on the list after a minute or two.

Easy Invention Ideas – Use What Irritates

What irritates you? Do you hate the way the ice builds up on the edge of your roof? Do you get annoyed with the way the dog slops his water and food all over the kitchen floor? Annoyances and irritating things are not just problems, but excellent opportunities for easy invention ideas.

Suppose you are tired of burning your tongue on hot coffee. What could save you from this irritation? Perhaps a cup with a built-in thermometer that shows green once the coffee has cooled enough? Maybe a cooling device to set a coffee cup in, like a small fan that blows across the coffee when the cup is set on the device?

Annoyed with the necessity of brushing your teeth so often? Maybe there is a Teflon-like coating that could be applied, so food wouldn’t stick. If it was anti-bacterial as well, you might avoid plaque even after days without brushing.

Looking at what is around you and imagining small or large improvements is easy. It also isn’t too difficult to train yourself to look at problems as opportunities. There are dozens of other techniques that will give you easy invention ideas, but start with these two simple ones and you can have a hundred new ideas today.

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Gmail Labs’ new "Got the Wrong Bob" feature saves you the embarrassment of sending an email to the wrong contact by alerting you whenever you compose an email to a contact with the same name as any of your frequently emailed contacts.

Got the Wrong Bob joins the forces of other embarrassment savers available in Gmail Labs, from the previously mentioned Undo Send feature to the silly but useful Mail Goggles feature.

To enable any of these Labs features, just head to the Labs settings page, enable the feature you want, then save your changes. Hopefully in the future you won’t get another "Did you mean to send this to another Bob?" response from a wayward contact.

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"Every one loves to have the Gadgets which helps & entertain in our daily life. Infact in the present time no one can even think a life without a gadgets. I am one of those who love to have all the latest gadgets. The reason why I started this blog to make all of you aware of the new gadgets introduced in the market. I hope you may be benefitted with this blog and will continue visiting this blog frequently". – Abhisek Vibhuti

Logitech Squeezebox Boom

College students love music, so the Squeezebox is perfect. The Wi-Fi radio speakers can stream premium music content from online music services, along with internet radio stations. Some of the services offered are Sirius, Rhapsody, Slacker, Pandora, and Last.fm. But that’s not all, it also streams music straight from a PC or Mac on a Wi-Fi network. For $5 more, you can add an extension cable to add an iPod, PC or another source. It’s available on the Logitech website and will run you $300.

iPhone 3GS

The iPhone is still the hottest phone in the market and everyone wants to get their hands on the one of these devices. The iPhone 3GS takes it to another level by offering video recording and editing capability. While many may not like AT&T, its the only carrier if you want the iPhone. The 3GS could end up being your go to device for everything.

Amazon Kindle DX

Carrying around those heavy textbooks no longer applies with the Amazon DX. It’s only 19 ounces and can hold hundred of textbooks for all your classes. You can download books under 60 seconds but most college kids are also pretty savvy internet users, so look online, you’ll also get access to textbooks from such educational publishers as Cengage Learning, Pearson and Wiley. The 9.7-inch screen wireless reading device costs $489. If you can find textbooks online, then the cost of the device might not be so bad, considering textbooks can be very expensive.

Playstation 3 Slim

Sony came out last week and made their gaming console very appealing by making it slimmer, lighter and faster. Most college students will already be in school when Sony releases the gaming console, but it’ll be out during the first week of September, so it’s not too far away. Plus with the slimmer design, it’ll be easier to carry around.

iPod Touch 3rd Generation/Microsoft Zune HD

Apple is planning to release their 3rd generation iPod Touch music player. It’s rumored to be updated with a camera. The iPod Touch is one of the best selling music players out in the market, so why not get the updated version.

If you’re not an Apple person, then Microsoft is releasing the Zune HD. It’ll offer a touchscreen with a Tegra processor, and updated OS. Plus it looks good enough to compete against Apple’s Touch.

The Zune HD will start out at $220 for the 16GB version, while the Apple iPod Touch will probably be in the $250 range for 16GB version.

Macbook Pro

Apple has lowered the price for their Macbook Pro line and also included the 13-inch in their Pro family. The 13-inch starts out at $1,199, while the 15-inch will run you around $1,699, and then the high end 17-inch, starts out at $2,499. All of the Macbook Pros are available with a student discount on Apple’s Education Store.

Brita Ultramax Filter

If you’ve ever lived in a dorm room, then you know you never want to drink the water on campus. Most kids end up getting bottled water but that adds up and not really green. To solve that problem, get a Brita filter, better yet, get a Brita Ultramax water dispenser. It’ll give you 18 8 ounce glasses of water and has a electronic gauge that’ll tell you when it’s time to change the filter. The water dispenser will cost you $42. Split it with your roommate and you’re looking at $21 for a convenient and healthy water solution.

Nikon Coolpix S1000PJ Projector Camera

Teens love taking pics of themselves and their friends and what better way to share them right away instead of waiting for them to be uploaded on Facebook, than on your dorm room wall. The Nikon projector camera solves that problem. It can make a 40-inch picture from six feet away, showing your friends all the stupid things you were doing while getting hammered last night. It’s a fun and an expensive camera. But you pay more for the latest features and a projector on a camera is something. The cost of the Nikon projector camera is $429 and will be available soon, in September.

Nintendo DSi

Nintendo’s most popular handheld gaming console will definitely make the breaks between classes a little more fun. No one really studies in between classes right? So, why not pull out your DSi and continue your saved game until it’s time to head into Econ 101. The handheld console will run you around $169.99 and is available now.

Shure Professional Headphones

I’m a big fan of headphones and when Shure, known for their ear phones, released three professional headsets, I wanted one. They’re available in 3 different models. Prices for the professional headsets ranges from $59.99 for the entry level headset, $99 for the mid level headsets and $199.99 for the higher end model. They’re definitely worth grabbing if you’re going to cram for exams and papers. Might as well listen to your music comfortably.

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VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer reveals the tricks that keep the world’s biggest social network going.

Last week, the world’s biggest social network, Facebook, announced that it had reached 300 million users and is making enough money to cover its costs.
 
The challenge of dealing with such a huge number of users has been highlighted by hiccups suffered by some other social-networking sites. Twitter was beleaguered with scaling problems for some time and became infamous for its "Fail Whale"–the image that appears when the microblogging site’s services are unavailable.

In contrast, Facebook’s efforts to scale have gone remarkably smoothly. The site handles about a billion chat messages each day and, at peak times, serves about 1.2 million photos every second.

Facebook vice president of engineering Mike Schroepfer in one of the conference in Cambridge, MA. He spoke with assistant editor Erica Naone about how the company has handled a constant flow of new users and new features.

EN: What makes scaling a social network different from, say, scaling a news website?

MS: Almost every view on the site is a logged-in, customized page view, and that’s not true for most sites. So what you see is very different than what I see, and is also different than what your sister sees. This is true not just on the home page, but on everything you look at throughout the site. Your view of the site is modified by who you are and who’s in your social graph, and it means we have to do a lot more computation to get these things done.

EN: What happens when I start taking actions on the site? It seems like that would make things even more complex.

MS: If you’re a friend of mine and you become a fan of the Green Day page, for example, that’s going to show up in my homepage, maybe in the highlights, maybe in the "stream." If it shows me that, it’ll also say three of [my] other friends are fans. Just rendering that home page requires us to query this really rich interconnected dataset–we call it the graph–in real time and serve it up to the users in just a few seconds or hopefully under a second. We do that several billion times a day.

EN: How do you handle that? Most sites deal with having lots of users by caching–calculating a page once and storing it to show many times. It doesn’t seem like that would work for you.

MS: Your best weapon in most computer science problems is caching. But if, like the Facebook home page, it’s basically updating every minute or less than a minute, then pretty much every time I load it, it’s a new page, or at least has new content. That kind of throws the whole caching idea out the window. Doing things in or near real time puts a lot of pressure on the system because the live-ness or freshness of the data requires you to query more in real time.

We’ve built a couple systems behind that. One of them is a custom in-memory database that keeps track of what’s happening in your friends network and is able to return the core set of results very quickly, much more quickly than having to go and touch a database, for example. And then we have a lot of novel system architecture around how to shard and split out all of this data. There’s too much data updated too fast to stick it in a big central database. That doesn’t work. So we have to separate it out, split it out, to thousands of databases, and then be able to query those databases at high speed.

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View All Portraits
This is a really interesting feature in Picasa. You can view all the photos across all the albums with faces. To the left of the search bar, on the top, click on the face icon. Click on the icon again to get out of this mode, or click on ‘back to view all’. This is a filter, the other filter for photographs available is all the pictures that are starred.

Upload A Slideshow To YouTube
Select the ‘Movie’ button in the bottom bar of Picasa. The first slide will be a text slide to introduce the slideshow. Rearrange the photos, add captions, select a music, select the transitions, and preview the slideshow a few times. Once you are done, click on save movie, and then use the YouTube upload button in the interface to put the movie on YouTube. Needless to say, you need to have a Google account and an Internet connection for this feature to work.

Sync Picasa3 Software And Web Albums
On the top right corner, above the album or folder is the sync button. Using this feature automatically saves all changes you have made to your copy of the album to the version of the album on Picasa. This works for changes to the file, the tags, and photos added or deleted to the album. This does not work for re-ordering the photos around in the album and changes made to the file names.

Touch Up Photos
This is used to remove spots from the surface of the lense, artefacts caused due to dust particles or water droplets, and scratches and dust from old photographs.

Double-click on an image once it is added to an album. Under the ‘Basic fixes’ tag, select ‘Retouch’. Use the ‘Brush size’ slider to select a brush size. Ideally, you should select a brush size a little larger than the size of the artefact you are trying to remove. Click once on the blot, and click to a similar place elsewhere in the picture. The smaller the brush size, the less noticeable the patch up will be. Hovering over different parts of the picture, you should see the blot getting covered up. You can undo a bad patch in this window itself. Once you are done fixing everything, click on apply.

If you want to undo your changes, you cannot automatically redo them.

Screencapture Album
As long as Picasa is running, taking a screenshot of the screen using the [Print Screen] button will save the image and add it to Picasa.

Improve All Your Photos
This feature works to different degrees of effectiveness for different photos, but is one of those buttons that looks like magic. If you trust Google more than your photography skills, select an album go to Picture > Batch Edit > I’m feeling lucky. There is no explanation for exactly what this does to your photos, but some photos were improved, some were horribly damaged. Copy all your files to another folder before you try this though, before something goes horribly wrong.

Collage
The collage view in Picasa is a interesting little feature to give previews for your Web albums. On top of the folder or album, next to the play slideshow button, is the Make Collage button. Click on this button, and you will be taken to the collage window. The default collage option is the picture pile, with three border settings, no border, white border, and instant camera border. If your pictures are captioned, the captions will show up next to the photos in the collage. There are five other collage options available, mosaic, frame mosaic, grid, contact sheet and multiple exposure. The mosaic arranges pictures in blocks of random sizes. The frame mosaic displays one image in the centre, and frames it with the other photos. The grid and contact sheet have cells of equal sized images, and the multiple exposure mosaic is a strange option to superimpose all the images in an album on top of one another. Do not use this option even by mistake in an album or folder with a lot of photos unless you want to crash your computer.

Search For Photos By Colour
This is an experimental feature in Picasa 3, that lets you search for all the photos with a color scheme. Google searches for Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple and BW photos. We wish they would have included a colour picker for this feature. Go to Tools > Experimental, and search for and click a colour. The orange search returns everything from red to yellow. The green and blue searches are most accurate. The black and white searches returns all pale and grey colors, not photos that are strictly black and white.

Customise The Bottom Toolbar
Picasa 3 allows you to remove the rarely used features from the bottom toolbar. Go to Tools > Configure buttons, then remove, add or re-order the buttons as per your requirements and save the settings.

Get Rid Of Duplicate Files
To get rid of duplicate files, go to Tools > Experimental > Show duplicate files. Then select one copy of the files and press the delete button.

Copy protect your photos
To automatically add a watermark to all the photos you upload to Picasa, go to Tools > Options and then select the ‘Web albums’ tab. Check the ‘Add a watermark for all photo uploads’ checkbox and edit the text in the field. The photos uploaded to Picasa will have the watermark, but the photos on your disk will be untouched.

Adding A Watermark To All Photos
To automatically add a watermark to all the photos you upload to Picasa, go to Tools > Options and then select the ‘Web albums’ tab. Check the ‘Add a watermark for all photo uploads’ checkbox and edit the text in the field. The photos uploaded to Picasa will have the watermark, but the photos on your disk will be untouched.

Source : Digit

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Choose a building and touch a floor and it tells you more details of the building.
Well, it doesn’t have to be a building, but it can be any object you see. You can use it when you want to know a car model, an insect name, what kind of food is served at a restaurant and how much, who built a bridge, etc. etc. But as a designer myself, I hope it’s able to tell me a name of a font of the type I see, the size, color (in RGB), and so on.

It’s got a scanner built in, so you can use it this way when you want to check the meaning of a word in the newspaper, book, magazine, etc.

It would be much easier to read a real book. You can use the dictionary, wikipedia, thesaurus and anything else available on the web. What do you think?

I think the following ideas should enhance the functionality of the device I introduced. Many applications like these will be developed that have never been possible.

Indoor guide
Works in a building, airport, station, hospital, etc.

Automatic simultaneous translation

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