Dashboard

When asked "To whom does design address itself?", the husband and wife team, Charles and Ray Eams, answered "To the need." —Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City

Many of us use services on the web that handle our photos, bookmarks, videos, calendars, and blog entries which also frequently notify us of similar friend activity. These services along with email, instant messenger, Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms can compete for our attention, encouraging us to jump all over the web to stay up-to-date. Our task is to aggregate this data into an easily consumable and configurable Dashboard and make it useful to 2-3 different contexts.

Goals

Design dashboards that allows a user to be updated on the happenings of their social sphere.
Write personas and scenarios to explain the type of information and functionality of your dashboard.
Address the contexts in which you're designing for which can be mobile, desktop, ambient, etc.
The included content must be attainable via some kind of feed or API service which will require some research and understanding for the services you intend to incorporate.

Research

Focus your research around services individuals might find useful to see in their dashboard and platforms you want to design for. Try to explore services you're unfamiliar with and see how people use them and what functionality they offer. Some examples could be YouTube, Vimeo, Plurk, Flickr, Virb, Dopplr, Del.icio.us, Digg,Twitter, Authentic Jobs, Boxee, Facebook, Gowalla, Foursquare, etc. When researching platforms study the existing UI closely, this is what people are already comfortable with so you'll want to use that to your advantage when designing your interface. Some platforms like the iPhone OS and Mac OS have HIG guidelines that you could try to follow.