NEU Dashboard

The Nation Education Union (NEU) are the largest education union representing teachers, lecturers, support staff, and school leaders, in maintained and independent schools and colleges across the UK. As an organisation they have a powerful voice in speaking to Government and policy makers and have been effective in winning improvements to members’ working conditions and shaping an education system that works for all.

The NEU approached me to design a tool to spearhead internal decision-making by unifying digital trace data from the broader NEU ecosystem into one automatically updating centralised admin area.

My main challenge in designing the UI and UX of this dashboard was making complex information easily and intuitively digestible for users that may have little to no familiarity with these kinds of data, or the way models are typically visualised in scientific computing.

The plan for the entire backend of the dashboard was to run on a SQL database, this meant I didn’t have to worry about the APIs from which the data originated but rather the emphasise lay in the schema and scaling of variables and values in the database. It was imperative that the dashboard be consistent across all the data it displayed and by utilising a pre-alpha stage with SQL and core recurring data which fed into a dynamically safe sandbox, I created a bespoke library to visualise the data. A great deal of value was added to the design by making all of its output embed neatly into the dashboard. 

After much collaboration on a github repo of the tool, I was able to test the robustness of the UI and UX which needed to handle a vast amount of information that was complex and domain-specific. A consideration which had been a constant thread from start to finish was a) How will users use it? and b) How will they derive value from it? Armed with these questions, I initiated a phase of testing and research interviews with target users to identify where the biggest design challenges for enhanced usability might lie, and where effective changes could be made to iron out the pain points.

A deliberately minimalist UX and UI database library designed to prioritise intuitive, seamless usability. The navigation hierarchy gives prominence to key top-level pages, while sub-navigation supports more granular data and functional actions. Content priority remains consistent across devices, ensuring a consistent user experience on desktop, tablet, and mobile.

The NEU were incredibly pleased with the outcome, using the platform to help shape union policy, drive effective campaigning, and significantly increase member engagement.