Years ago I came across Milestone Slip Charts – which are graphical ways to show the history of a plan. I think they are pretty powerful because they make it v. clear whats gone on and you can’t really hide behind them. The top axis shows the planned milestone dates the left axis is real time – i.e. the chart shows how the milestones have changed over time.
Milestone History Chart
However…. they are a complete pain in the arse to draw, keep up to date etc… When I was building the basic prototype for the Milestone Planner I realised that the data I was capturing anyway would make it v. easy to build a milestone slip chart (or perhaps we should call it a Milestone History Chart – apparently some projects don’t slip !!).
One concern is that this may just be too complicated to decipher and that a simpler (but not as rich) way of showing history would make more sense.
So useful… or too complicated?
Spent the last hour in Costa Coffee doing some more pictures to illustrate design ideas.
This one is for showing / editing the Milestone details – i.e. it Title, Owner and Status colour (will also allow people to change the due date here – although I’d imagine that most people would just drag & drop miletones on the timeline to do this). The box would pop up when you clicked on a milestone. At some point (once the basic version is up & running, I’d hope to add a whole bunch of stuff into this screen showing the history of the milestone – i.e. who made what changes to it when) and a wikipedia-like way of reversing changes.
Today I’ve been working on the main screen design for the Milestone Planner app (which probably needs a better name!!). I’m trying to keep it relatively simple, but to show ‘at a glance’ where stuff is on the timeline. Theres probably still a lot of tweaking of colours etc… but I chose a blue-ish theme as it kind of says “respectable” (Correct me if I’m wrong on this). I think the design must have something to it as I kept forgetting I was using OmniGraffle and trying to click the controls etc. It seems like a good idea to try and get 80% of the way there with the layout etc before I commit to code (I’m planning to code the colour scheme to make it tweakable later anyway), so the plan at the moment is to try and get some feedback on this design, and flesh out a few of the other screens and show what needs to happen when stuff gets rolled-over / clicked etc
