b.world's new digital coach helps your team quickly onboard and manage projects consistently and transparently. And if that wasn't enough... our upgraded charts in logframes and stories enable you to more effectively visualize and share results with all stakeholders.
This release includes many new features which add continuity and consistency across the b.world platform and provide educational onboarding content to ease users’ transitions into engaging with b.world. Our hope is that these new features will significantly improve the user experience and encourage additional use of the platform. Please see below for details:
Platform coaching: A series of informative and educational messages will now appear throughout the platform as means of guiding users through their b.world experience. This messaging is primarily intended for new users to help onboard them to b.world. Users will have the ability to dismiss the messages in many cases and, in some cases, the ability to re-invoke messages to get refreshed on specific sections of the platform.
Project Elements in Whiteboard: Any Goals, Objectives, Activities and/or Indicators that a team has added to the Project Elements section can now be utilized in any whiteboard. This means that when users modify the text on a logframe object (e.g., Goal) that’s been placed on a whiteboard canvas, they will have the option to select from a corresponding list of items from Project Elements. This feature brings another element of continuity to the platform’s design.
type-forward search ensures you can use consistent project elements across projects
Add dimensions to indicators in Project Elements: When creating an indicator in Project Elements, users are now able to add dimensions/disaggregates from the Dimensions section of Project Elements. This enable all aspects of a global indicator—or, one that lives in Project Elements and can be used across projects—to be created at the team level instead of at the indicator level. This is intended to be another time-saving feature and one that enables team administrators to have full control over indicator creation, if desired.
Above: sample global dimension added to a global indicator
Enhanced data visualization: Data visualization in b.world has been enhanced in a number of ways to offer a more consistent user experience and to improve interpretability and legibility of the data:
Above: sample upgraded chart in b.world logframe
Modified color palette to improve interpretability of the visualizations, especially the line graphs
Thicker line for topline values in line graphs for easier visual differentiation from disaggregate value lines
More Options section bundles many of the customizable options that you’re already familiar with (e.g., axis labels) for a cleaner look and feel
Stacking disaggregates (vs. having them side-by-side) is now available within More Options
Target and Baseline values can appear on the visualizations by selecting the appropriate checkboxes within More Options
Logframe and Stories data visualization look the same, offering a consistent user experience across sections within the platform
Cleaner, clearer data labels on the charts themselves and the x-axis for indicators with semi-annual reporting periods
Bug Fixes and Minor UI Improvements
Registration: Users can now successfully register using external authentication (i.e., Microsoft or Google logins) without receiving an error message.
Overview: Attempting to delete an Organization or Thing that has already been added to one or more indicators on a project presents a user-friendly error instead of a 404 page.
Logframe: When downloading a PNG of an indicator’s line graph, the line wasn’t downloading in the image. This has been fixed.
Logframe: Deleted locations (from the Locations section within Measurement Properties on Indicator Setup) will no longer reappear when adding new locations.
Logframe: Deleted locations (from the Locations section within Measurement Properties on Indicator Setup) will no longer reappear after saving indicator details and reopening the Indicator Setup screen.
Logframe: Validation which was previously in place to ensure that overlapping age ranges could not be added under the Age dimension on an indicator has been readded.
Logframe: On the Indicator Setup window, individual Organization and Thing stakeholders had to be deselected to not display on the corresponding results table; now, only the Stakeholder switch has to be in the ‘off’ position for this to be the case. (NOTE: Once data has been added to an indicator, Stakeholders and other Measurement Properties that have been added to an indicator cannot be removed.)
Logframe: The application no longer throws a 404 error if a target value is entered without setting a target date on an indicator.
Logframe: There’s now a splash page for the Chart tab on an indicator where data hasn’t been entered yet.
Logframe: Bold style still is no longer retained on some reporting period labels in the indicator data table when the Stakeholder switch is toggled from on to off in Indicator Setup.
Logframe: Projects without stakeholders now have indicator titles properly populating on the corresponding Indicator Setup screen.
Whiteboard: Objects added to the whiteboard were sometimes invisible; in other cases, deleted objects were reappearing. These issues have been remedied.
Whiteboard: All text changes are now saving as expected.
Stories: If an indicator includes dimensions/disaggregates from Project Elements, this information now appears on data visualizations.
Stories: Some charts linked to SDG indicators could not be inserted into stories; this issue has been addressed.
As always, please continue to share your feedback and let us know what you love or if anything is not functioning in the platform as expected. Thank you for your ongoing involvement and insight as we strive to design and build the best b.world we can for you and your social impact colleagues around the world.