Observing User Interface Design Patterns for Websites from a User-experience Point-of-View

Abstract

Nowadays, user dashboards have been widely used everywhere, and the design complexity is growing with the more and more advanced technology. A very important aspect in user dashboards design is their specifications that describe what the systems have to do. The specification should provide criteria for the systems to be designed. The criteria are formulated in a specification language, which is kept preferably on a high abstraction level and, for example, need not be executable. The specification gives a formal model by class-library extensions, by this way to ensure the consistency of the systems and define the properties of the systems. In many modern applications, graphs play important role in representing the specifications of user dashboards. The richness and practical purposes are needed by the specifications. The richness comes from several resources, which have the variations in the way of different types of graphs. Besides the general graph, there are Conditional Process Graph (CPG), Petri nets and other types of graphs. It turns more difficult to work on these graph representations in a textual format since now the user dashboards become more and more complicated. We need to develop a visual dashboard, which users can design and edit the graph visually based on certain form of specifications. There exist some kind of dashboards for graphs, but they each mostly focus on one type of graph at a time. If new graph is introduced, they cannot work anymore. So, we propose an extensible visual dashboard, which can edit many types of graph with their own specifications that are defined in formal ways. All the representations in the dashboard are graph-based and they share common concepts such like edges and nodes. By this way, the dashboard becomes extensible and it is not simply the combination of several dashboards. In this paper, we study different methods to design user dashboards, and evaluate the best practices in designing the same.