Introduction
Dashboards. A dynamic view of data that gives the user an easy, interactive, and fun-to-look-at place with all of the information they need. That’s when they are done right. When they are done wrong they can be a mesh of information that is hard to look at and even harder to decode. So how do you ensure that your dashboards look like the former and not the latter? You put into place the techniques from Luca Petriconi’s article on the topic (the article can be found here). In the article Petriconi lets us in on insights about dashboards in general and his 7 tips to make your dashboards better.
Summary of Article
First off there are 3 types of dashboards. There are strategic dashboards, operational dashboards, and analytical dashboards. The differences are that strategic dashboards are more high-level, they feature historical data, and are designed to help management make decisions about the whole company. Operational dashboards are used for daily use and usually used for a smaller group of people – such as one team – and they have data to find out what is happening right now. Analytical dashboards are dashboards used by people who have experience with data and understanding it as they are a bit more technical in nature, they usually feature aspects such as pivot tables, drill downs, and have a lot of data within them. As you can see there are a lot of types of dashboards with different use cases but one thing that all of these dashboards share is their ability to improve and, in the article, Petriconi shows you how to do just that with his 7 tips for improving dashboards.
The 7 tips for improving dashboards are as follows:
- Let stakeholder goals help design your dashboard
- Start with a question
- Consider Multidimensional Metrics
- Keep in mind how your end user interacts with the dashboard
- Focus on what’s relevant
- Implement user feedback
- Be consistent with your design
In the article Petriconi goes into more detail about each of these tips but overall they boil down to three main ideas:
- Focus on your user
- Only include the necessary information
- Be consistent
If you make sure to keep these tips in mind when designing your dashboard you will definitely see improvement in your dashboard, and your stakeholders will thank you for it.
My Take
These tips really helped me, as they were a set of concrete items that I could keep in mind and make sure I followed when I am designing my dashboards. It has always helped me to have something like a list of items to cross reference to check something over as it ensures that I am able to be consistent and meet all the requirements. I also really liked the visuals provided in the article as Petriconi provided an example of every dashboard that he mentioned which was nice to contextualize things. Petriconi’s explanations of the concepts were also good as they were very easy to follow.
Conclusion
All in all, this article was a good one that was really interesting and helped me learn a lot. It was also written in a nice and easy-to-follow manner which helped in contextualizing the concepts presented in the article. Petriconi presented the reader with visuals to accompany what he said and the types of dashboards he talked about which was a nice reference point. Lastly, the concrete tips that Petriconi gave to help with upgrading your dashboards, no matter the style, were a nice addition. In conclusion, this was a good article and I recommend you give it a read (the article can be found here).