Concept Development and User Experience Measurement of Dipor Dashboard for Monitoring Status for Digital Service Development Projects

Abstract

In Finland, tax payers’ money is used by public sector organizations to implement open source digital services to solve problem situations raised by common citizens. However, traditional long development cycle often results with solutions that don’t address intended users’ needs. To remedy this, Digipalvelutehdas community introduced a process that would require a 3-month long development phase to produce a testable proof of concept for any digital service. To permit further implementation, the development progress needed to be closely monitored. Digipalvelutehdas brought up the idea of Dipor Dashboard for monitoring service development and Sampo Software Oy was assigned to develop a testable interface. The thesis work focused on defining requirements for this dashboard out of needs from its intended users and proposed a concept using low fidelity design sketches. The goal was to determine how attributes from GitHub repositories could be visualized in a Dashboard view to project development progress. The usability and feasibility of the system developed by Sampo Software was also evaluated. User experience study of the system had been done in a limited scope.

The thesis report begins with background work. A competitor analysis for existing market solutions is then provided. A discussion is made on existing work over Dashboard design, Agile development visualization and using GitHub attributes to build Agile workflows. First phase of empirical work involved interviewing the customer and intended users to develop concept for the dashboard using iterative design and evaluation of low fidelity prototypes. Usability evaluation of the implemented system was done in second phase with two heuristic evaluations and five usability tests. A four week long user study was initiated with two participants in the third phase, which was continued for two weeks due to unavoidable circumstances.

The implemented Dipor Dashboard focused more on organization hierarchy than on Digital services. The supposed dashboard view turned out to be an integration view for comparing different repository works intended for the same service. Used charts had issues in look & feel, functionality and data representation. Development progress wasn’t visualized following Agile methodology. Major design and functionality rework would be needed to make the system more usable. Although being a better option, the developed concept needs more research on appropriate visualizations and common data framework to integrate systems other than GitHub repositories.