Dashboard
Give cards, notes, tokens, or running state a labelled place on the page.
A preset of zones. Attribution: Switchback original (a session HUD). Licence: original; no restriction.
Variants
- default
Data fields
The fields a spec's page can set for this component (see switchback show dashboard --json):
zonescolumns
Grounding
Helps: when a session has several pieces of state to hold at once (the current decision, open questions, time left); keeping them in view frees working memory in reminder and saving studies, and items in one box tend to be read as a group
Backfires: when the boxes are not kept current, since offloading helps only while the store can be trusted, or when something offloaded is needed later without the page, because people remember less of what they expect to be able to look up
- CItems placed inside the same bounded region are perceived as belonging together, even against other grouping cues, so labelled zones make category membership readable at a glance.Wagemans et al. (2012)
- BKeeping task-relevant information in a stable, visible external store, rather than in working memory, improves performance on the concurrent task, at the cost of weaker memory for the offloaded content.Gilbert (2015), Storm & Stone (2015), Sparrow, Liu & Wegner (2011), Risko & Gilbert (2016), Meyerhoff, Grinschgl, Papenmeier & Gilbert (2021), Hesselmann (2020)
- BLeaving a visible cue of where you were and what comes next at the point of interruption reduces the time and errors involved in resuming a task.Hodgetts & Jones (2006), Monk, Trafton & Boehm-Davis (2008), Altmann & Trafton (2002)