What’s always interesting to me is how much the little things matter — like the extra split second it took you to process my design and the extra one it took me to process Greg’s. It was initially tempting for me to say, aw, what’s it matter? I got the point. So what if it took a few extra blinks?

But I have to remind and re-remind myself that those extra blinks, for some of my students, particularly for those who don’t easily construct meaning from words, constitute the difference between buying-in and checking-out. So all the gradients, scalings, positive re-framing, and tiny tiny redesigns, the stuff that seems too picky by half, are all part of what makes this teaching thing so special to me.

Which isn’t to say I’m sad to see it go for a few months. Enjoy your break, too, Lori.

I would actually love something like this at my school site, both on a newly-designed website (ours is a dismal joke) and as some sort of static display in our main hallway, and am considering proposing it for next year, but I’m going to weigh in on the side of the original. The green, yellow and red with the sliding arrows (you can’t really consider the arrows in isolation from the colors and the bars) took me less than a second to read and digest the meaning with no explanation necessary other than the info on the dashboard (and that’s about how long anyone should take looking at this (it is after all intended to serve as a weekly snapshot). I can’t figure out why anyone needs to spend much time on gradients or scaling or trying to positively state each dashboard indicator or whatever on a something as straight forward as this. It actually made the redesign much more difficult to quickly figure out. I had to stop and work at actually seeing what was before me; I think it was the empty boxes that had me momentarily flummoxed.

My only suggestion: make the arrows bigger and play with the fonts and text and background colors. So much for sophisticated design principles. In this case, keep it simple, simple, simple.

By the way, Dan, I’ve really loved reading your stuff this year. What a find. Only an hour or so at work tomorrow and vacation begins! Hope the summer is sweet to you.

Scott, if we were using an arbitrary checkerboard animation to move between two different slides on experimental psychology (e.g.), I’d make the same case for superfluous eye candy. But consider the scenario, if you haven’t, of someone discussing the data, say, at a staff meeting. It strikes me as a value-added proposition there to let her reveal the data sequentially, while discussing their significance.

Is the animation just eye candy? The quick snapshot of the data is what we need. Can’t we just get it all at once rather than waiting for it to be displayed one bit at a time? Maybe this is a personal quirk of mine; I’m usually not a big fan of using incremental bullets on PowerPoint slides either. Unless there’s a specific reason why some of the information on the screen needs to pop up later, I tend to say just put it all up there. [note: this is not a denigration of your work; I am simply lending my own limited design perspective]

That being said, your design is a clear improvement over the original. But, yeah, we report and are interested in referrals (negative) and attendance rate (positive). Maybe one gradient can run right to left, with its label opposite the others?

There are exceptionally rare cases when more information is undesirable. All you’ve offered here is your distaste for this buzzword “accountability” (which I admit I share somewhat). You haven’t actually made a case for anything but your own annoyance.

So: how would reflecting student behavior back to them (like Greg has done) harm a school’s environment or its kids?

Marco, what’s weird to me here is that Greg’s public display of ugly data is a very collectivist approach to a process that is typically individualistic.