On Wednesday, March 25th, 12-1 pm, OPEN will be hosting a virtual workshop titled "Fix My Dashboard!: Exploring Best Practices and Pitfalls in Dashboard Design" by Tom Withee and Amber Lewis.

Dashboards can be effective tools for visualizing data and driving decision-making; however, many dashboards fall short in delivering clear, actionable insights. In this workshop, we will focus on the key design elements that make dashboards both effective and user-friendly. In the first half of this workshop, participants will learn about best practices for layout, visual clarity, and user experience to ensure that their dashboards communicate data effectively. The second half of the workshop will focus on reviewing examples of dashboards in need of improvement. In group discussions, we will analyze dashboards and brainstorm ideas on how to enhance their design, usability, and functionality. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own dashboards for feedback on how to make them more effective. By the end of the session, participants will leave with practical strategies to design dashboards that are visually engaging, intuitive to use, and capable of delivering meaningful insights to stakeholders.

More about our presenters:

• Tom Withee is the Owner / Principal Researcher for Fulcrum DataViz that supports school districts, colleges and universities, not-for-profit organizations and informal education entities with evaluation, research and data visualization services. Tom has been a program evaluator and education researcher since 2019 where he has developed expertise as a data thought partner for organizations by helping them understand what data they already have, what data they could/should use, how to interpret that data and how to communicate effectively with their data. Tom has presented on developing and designing interactive data dashboards for several local evaluation affiliates including EASL, H-PEA, IEA and Seattle; at multiple AEA conferences, and for organizations. He is passionate about making STEM education accessible to all students as is evidenced by the projects he supports.
• Amber Lewis is the Principal Evaluator for Kindling Insights, a new evaluation practice focused primarily on serving nonprofit and community programs. Amber has been supporting the evaluation efforts of funders, nonprofits, and universities for nearly a decade, serving in both internal evaluation and external consulting capacities. She has led evaluation projects for St. Louis area education-focused nonprofits and a variety of National Science Foundation grants seeking to promote equity in STEM within secondary and higher education. Amber works with program teams to understand how to define and measure program success, from developing logic models and instrumentation to data collection, analysis, and reporting. She seeks to provide both quantitative and qualitative analysis in ways that are engaging, offer actionable insights, and are informed by the collaboration and voices of diverse stakeholders. She is passionate about making data accessible and empowering clients to ask and answer questions that meaningfully affect and improve their work on behalf of others. Amber is a member of the American Evaluation Association and serves on the board of the Evaluation Association of St. Louis.