OSX Dashboard — Re-imagined
With Apple moving into the flat design trend, how I’m imagining the dashboard widgets to be
The need
Having recently moved to Mavericks, I still remember being excited to see the updates Apple had made to their OS, live in action. But one thing that caught my attention was the dashboard. I wasn’t happy about the widgets section being completely out of place and not going well with the trend Apple was following. I thought rather than cribbing about it, I should get my hands dirty and come up with a concept I think the new dashboard should be. I also wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just another re-skinning or beautification layer to the existing one. I’ve done some small yet useful modifications that I think enhances the dashboard experience for users.
The challenge
Visually there weren’t a lot of challenges because I think the current dashboard serves its purpose. Experience-wise I think they could be greatly improved. The biggest challenge was to design the useful, effective widgets using as little screen space as possible since most of the widgets are used for quick, at-a-glance viewing of content to aid people in a specific task. For example, when you are planning a road trip, you might want to check the weather forecast for the week so you can pack the necessary clothing. You quickly fire up the weather widget and glance at the weekly forecast. This is one of the general use-cases for dashboard widgets which are often used while you’re in the middle of another task. Making the widgets small is essential so that it doesn’t hinder the view of your current task which is in the background when you’re widgets are active.
Most often when a designer intends to redesign an interface, they think of all the cool things they can do visually to make it beautiful and rack up likes on Dribbble. This often compromises on the usability and experience. As a designer, I’ve been in this place where I wanted to redesign something out of pure excitement rather than usefulness. In this dashboard concept I’ve tried to focus on reducing clutter, cleaning up the widgets and making them more intuitive.
The design
I’ve picked the commonly used widgets based on my conversation with other users. In the selected widgets, I’ve tried to focus on the details of one widget in multiple states, improve usability, removing some of the not-so-useful features and make it more simple, yet visually appealing.
Auto-Align to grid
From my personal experience and some feedback from my user scenarios, I’ve seen that when you have 6—8 widgets it generally becomes difficult to organise them. I understand that the customization possibilities and flexibility of the dashboard is what gives a user their freedom, but you want the user to focus on the objective rather than organizing widgets. If you’re a pro-dashboard user, you would definitely find this feature as a time saver. I’ve also noticed that the layout changes sometimes on the first launch of dashboard in the day. I’m not sure if I’m the only one experiencing it but the auto-grid can help you arrange your widgets on your screen making your dashboard look cleaner and help you focus better.
Current location’s weather
Inspired by the simplicity in the iPhone, instead of having you type your current location one simply clicks on the current location icon (airplane) and using GPS co-ordinates your Mac finds your current location. No hassles!
Overall, this exercise was to create a beautiful and effective dashboard where I had the chance to visualise my ideas to be a cleaner, simpler and minimal approach on dashboard widgets.
