_edited_edited.png)
Data.. data.. data… Businesses today are surrounded by data which is great but it’s not that helpful if you want to make quick decisions. This is where Dashboard going to help. The dashboard takes your most important data and presents in a way where you can easily tell what’s going on at a glance. Because dashboard needs to get cross information quickly and efficiently the design & layout of the dashboard become all that important.
There are a few important rules to create an attractive dashboard
1. Attractive title for dashboard instead of generic one:
If possible, try to lead the title with question instead of generic once. It means if there is specific use case for which users are going to be accessing information so we can lead them there. Like here instead of “Sales Dashboard” we can use “When and Where are we selling effectively?”
2. Reduce clutter or Consider data ink ratio:
Another name for this is by reducing visual noise using “Data ink Ratio”. Most of the time unnecessary icons, colors, lines, grids, extra labels, anything that doesn’t communicate data creates clutter.
Well design dashboard aims to use little Non data ink in other word they have good data ink ratio. In practice it means removing clutter without losing key information.
3. Summary Tiles (Optional):
This might not be applicable to all dashboards, but summary tiles give key information to the users at the beginning of dashboard like how many hours we work, what is test score and below example how much sales and profit we did timeframe.
4. Strategize worksheet layout:
When we set up our dashboard think the way we read the book (considering English) so set up dashboard from top left to down right bottom. Also use group related metrics, It means group the similar charts together or set them near by this also helps you to save non data ink as Its going to use less labels and legends.
Note: if you have related group of metrics it’s helpful to be consistent in your choice of visualization. Like in following example instead of using different kind of bar charts can keep consistent visualization.
5. Include Instructions:
If there are some user interactivity like filtering data or selecting graphs any bars then e must include instructions as user may not aware of it until we instruct them or they find it accidentally.
6. Visual Separation between objects:
“Eyes always catches beautiful things” Don’t mix-up two different charts or objects. Try to give border to each of them or give different colors or assign transparent image to the background of dashboard (which allow user to read all data without any disturbance or missing information)
7. Limit unique colors and use color consistently:
Colors can be destructive rather than informative so try not to use too many unique colors. Probably 4-5 are the top band in most situations. Yes, you can go over that but try in to be strategic also be aware about color consistency like at one place if you use blue for gender male and pink for female then keep that same color combination to all your dashboard where you show gender related data. Another one if you use green color to show weekday and same green color you are using to show top number of sales then that can be confusing to user as we already set users mind for that green color. Using correct consistency also means working on opacity of some colors if you don’t want to make user focus on.
8. Leverage Tooltips:
Sometimes if we have more charts to dashboard then that might be more informative or visually overwhelming in that case, we can use tooltips to give all information if user hover to it or click on it instead of showing all to charts.
9. Info in buttons or footers:
If we want to put information like data definitions, description of dashboards, contact information or when data was last time refreshed, we can simply click under info button and it’s not eating much space. we can use it by hopping over.
10. Use the most efficient visualization:
Look at Figure 1 and Figure 2. Can you tell me which is bigger Red or Blue?
As from Figure 2 we can catch the difference easily and faster as compare to Figure 1.
When selecting a visualization you should always chose the one which most clearly and efficiently communicates data. That means it should take a little tile possible to understand what’s going on. In general Pie chart and Area chart are rarely best choice of visualization.
11. Give number context:
Numbers are their own don’t tell much, consider KPI’s until unless we compare against it. Giving context to a number in the form of status indicator or comparison can quickly tell us the significance of the numbers.
12. Tell a story:
This is the last but most important kind of topic. Always try to tell story to your user by using annotation and labeling as the more you led your user to water is better. Although they are asking you to help analyze data for them or provide some suggestions or highlight areas of interest.
So far if you think about design rules or all rules it made to be broken. At the end of day dashboard design is a bit more than just how efficiently you can layout 16 * 9 rectangle, ultimately its about people. It’s about what you can get them to engage with information and sometime most engaging dashboards do break the rules.
In conclusion: “When it comes to Dashboard you can always improve it.”
Thank you for reading my blog , I hope you find it helpful. Keep Reading...!!!