Supporting sense-making experiences of city dashboards - a design solution

Public city dashboards are online platforms giving access to data and information about a city to users. Giving access to data must, however, include methods to enable citizens to use this data which, first and foremost, requires users to be able to make sense of what they see. The desire to give access to open data through dashboards requires a considerable investment of time and resources - an investment that is wasted if dashboards are not useful to their users (citizens) and, as a result, are not used. Nevertheless, little research has looked at how citi- zens make sense of city dashboards. In this thesis, we describe a novel and rich qualitative analysis of citizens’ sense-making experiences of city dashboards. Firstly, using two sample city dashboards, we engage community activists from four different areas (Health, Environ- ment, Transport and Agriculture) to explore the information displayed. Secondly, we leverage Reflexive Thematic Analysis to identify key challenges that need to be addressed to support users making sense of city dashboards: lack of support given for understanding the infor- mation and data presented, lack of possibilities for users to engage, lack of purpose, and a lack of governance. Based on this analysis, we create a prototype dashboard for Galway City which is iteratively evaluated by citizens and design experts. Finally, by leveraging the results of our evaluation, we identify specific design elements that address our key challenges, and propose a design solution. This research is novel in that i) it is the first study that actually captures the sense-making needs of users in relation to city dashboards and ii) it makes a sig- nificant contribution in the form of a series of evidence-based recommendations for dashboard creators