[wdmmg-discuss] Remaining dashboard work

Tue May 18 11:23:28 UTC 2010

Dave Boyce wrote:

> I've just posted an initial release candidate of the new dashboard to:
>
>	http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/dashboard/

This is looking increasingly good. I'm just reviewing the tickets for the 
launch to check we've done everything, and I have a few questions:

  - How much of #176 is done? I can see for myself that item 5 isn't, for 
example, whereas quite a lot of the other items are. There is a comment 
from you three weeks ago saying one or two things are blocked on design; 
presumably these are now either "done" or "won't fix"? Would be nice to 
document the decisions and get this ticket closed.

  - #179 says that when I hover over e.g. a COFOG category in the 
dashboard, the pop-up should show me the detailed description (or possibly 
it should show me the first 25 words of the detailed description, and 
allow me to click through to the store). The data is ready, but on e.g. 
the bubble graph the tooltips seem to show the short COFOG names. Am I 
missing something?

  - "Info box" feature: in ticket #179 you say you've added it for "some of 
the views". Maybe I'm being dumb, but it took me ages to work out that I 
can click on the bars in the "regional overview". I don't think I would 
have found this feature if I didn't know what I was lookin for. I now see 
that the mouse cursor changes to give me a clue, but I don't think this is 
discoverable enough. I was expecting this to be in the hover text (i.e. no 
click required); change of plan? Also, are you planning to add info boxes 
to the bubble diagram? I think that's where it's most needed. The hover 
text in the bubble diagram is currently redundant (see previous bullet).

  - #328 is about deep linking into the store. In an info box, if I click 
on the "Link to data store", nothing seems to happen. It turns out that my 
browser is blocking a pop-up window. Is there anything you can do about 
that? E.g. can we make it open in the same window, replacing the 
dashboard?

  - Rufus tells me you've put some effort into reporting performance 
problems with the store. What's the ticket number? (I can't find it).

  - We talked about embedding comments in the info box, and I think we 
agreed not to try to do this before launch. However, looking ahead, it's 
beginning to look like we can get a long way by hanging the comments off 
COFOG codes. Thoughts?

New bug reports:

  - When the dashboard is waiting for data from the store, if I get 
impatient and navigate to a different graph, the dashboard seems to get 
confused. Navigation continues to work, but all the pages come up blank. I 
know the store needs to speed up, but the dashboard needs to cope with 
this race condition anyway.

  - The info box for "Education", is rather tall, and goes off my rather 
small screen. This means I can't click on "Close", and since it is a modal 
dialogue I can't do anything else either, other than reload the page. I 
think a scroll bar is needed, and pressing "Escape" or "Enter" to close 
the info box should also work, ideally.

Sorry to focus on the few remaining bad parts, but that is the nature of 
these discussions. As I said, overall it's really looking great!

 	Alistair