Dashboard Design Best Practices

·         A dashboard provides overview, summaries or exceptions at a glance, not all the details.  It draws your attention to something that needs action.

·         A dashboard provides easy access to supporting details.

·         Dashboard needs to fit in one screen, having to scroll prevents users from having a consolidated overview.

·         Dashboards are interactive. They should allow filtering, drill down to details and slicing/dicing of data.  It is best to provide these capabilities by clicking on data itself.

·         The most important area of dashboard is top left, display most important metrics there. The least important area is lower right corner.

·         Highlight the most important data or exceptions. Different font color, background color, bigger font, darker font or color contrast  are some of the ways to make important things stand out.

·         Use color sparingly. Soft colors are better. Use single hue with different intensities to show low/high values.

·         Refrain from displaying excessive precession.  E.g. $104 K instead of $104,557.86 .

·         Provide rich context for data. The 3 Ts for context are Target, Trend and Typical.

             e.g. Just showing revenue of $11.2 million will not tell if the we are doing good/bad.  Instead show actual revenue of $11.2, budget revenue of $13 M (Target)  and same day last revenue of $12 M year (Trend). Encourage comparison. Provide evaluation e.g.  Check Mark/Cross Mark or Traffic light to indicate how we are doing.

·         Minimize non-data ink. This includes unnecessary grid lines, coloring, border, fill color etc.  The supporting non-data ink (axis, borders) should be muted and have low visual impact.

·         Eliminate or reduce usage instructions on main page,  provide hyperlinks or pop-up windows instead. On similar lines eliminate or minimize company logos.

·         There can be multiple dashboards for different functions of business.

·         Dashboards are customized for the audience.

·         Selecting right metrics is key for dashboards.

·         Dashboard Components (Coming up).

o   Bullet Graphs, Gauges & Meters for Showing KPIs.

o   Sparkline for trends.

o   Line charts for time series.

o   Bar Chart for Categorical Comparison.

o   Scorecards for KPIs.