Why are Dashboards important?

What are Dashboards used for?

Dashboards are valuable tools to quickly see the latest changes in important key performance metrics. They allow users to quickly see, understand, and then take appropriate action on the most important things.

See

Understand

Take action

The design of a dashboard guides the user’s attention to certain metric visualisations, correctly or incorrectly. This in turn will cause them to draw conclusions, which will then determine their actions.

Dashboard Design Principles

Purpose

Be clear on the Purpose:

As with designing anything, a clear understanding of purpose is key. This will guide the design of the dashboard and help you to make decisions; What questions are you helping to answer? What metrics should you focus on? What level of detail is required?

Audience

Know the Audience:

Intertwined with the purpose of the dashboard, is understanding who the audience of the dashboard will be. The most effective form of communication, is tailored to be relevant to the audience. In-line with design thinking, you should start with the user, not the data. In addition to having the dashboard user clearly in your mind, you should actively engage the user, and iterate accordingly: don’t design in isolation.

Is your dashboard only visible to a select few, or will it be viewable by a wider audience? Don’t underestimate the power of making data widely available within your organisation, so that people can make informed decisions, and everyone is working from the same pool of understanding. Leverage the power of behavioral dynamics, social norms, and feedback to promote desired behaviors to drive the needle in the right direction.

If you have multiple stakeholder groups, then identify the most important stakeholder group, and design accordingly. You can then create different dashboards, tabs, or filters for the other groups. This may sound like more work, but it is a much better approach than trying to cram too much information onto a single dashboard, where the important information gets lost.

Viewing Medium

How will the dashboard be viewed?

Design the dashboard should with the delivery medium in mind. If you are designing for multiple platforms, (such as desktop, tablet, or mobile) then ensure the design is responsive, and the important information is always clearly visible. Similarly, ensure that the architecture of the dashboard is such that the dashboard will still perform on mobile’s lower bandwidth connections.

Clarity

Keep it clear:

The best dashboards allow the user to quickly see and understand the most important information. Apply the following to help ensure this is true of your dashboard.

Adopt minimalist design; Less is more. Don’t try and put all of the information on the same page. The first dashboard view should be a summary of the most important metrics. You shouldn’t have to scroll or zoom to see more information. If it’s not essential, don’t have it.
Use tabs to present more detailed information by theme
Ensure the eye is naturally drawn to the most important elements of the dashboard.
Choose the right visualisations: Read more here.
Use consistent, comparable scales: try and use consistent scales so that the data is easily comparable, and is less prone to hasty misinterpretation.
Ensure information is contextual; is performance good or bad? Relative to what
Understand how the data is obtained (dangers of misleading data)
Provide clear tiles & axis labels; can someone understand it without any explanation?
Colours: Keep the pallet of colours small. Saturated colours draw the eye. You can use this purposefully. RAG; be purposeful when using colours that have existing connotations. Red (problem), Amber (potentially a problem), Green (No problem)
Aesthetics: Beauty can help with the purpose of the dashboard. Make it something that people enjoy looking at. Modern dashboard designs are minimalist, clean and ‘flat’.

Actionable

Make it actionable;

Dashboards should be used to inform and drive action. Keep this in mind whilst you are designing your dashboard with the following points:

What is the action(s) the audience of the dashboard take as a result of the information on the different metrics the dashboard?
Does the planned visualisation equip the audience with sufficient information to take informed action?
Can the audience quickly access the relevant information to inform action?
How frequently refreshed does the data need to be? Real time is often aspired to, but it may not always be appropriate. It can focus the audience’s attention on recent ‘noise’, rather than the important trends or big picture.
If real time data really is important, then consider building in an alert system so that the relevant people are alerted when immediate action is required. For example, if a critical system goes down, you don’t want to run the risk that the right people aren’t looking at the dashboard at that exact moment.
Does the dashboard perform at the required level? Is the dashboard responsive or does it leave users frustrated with loading times?

See this example below for inspiration:

Other Resources:

The Big Book of Dashboards
Gecko Board’s “Ultimate Guide to data visualisations”

Conclusion:

Hopefully you now feel better equipped to create a dashboard of your own. The dashboard design principles will help you to ensure you have the answers to the important questions for your design process, and help you to make the difficult, but important decisions.

Do you think that something else should be included? What would you add (or subtract)?

Please comment below!