How does a journalistic technique relate to dashboard design? Well, business intelligence dashboards, like news items, are all about telling a story. This concept originated from the world of journalism, and basically divides the contents of a news report into three, in order of diminishing significance: the most important and substantial information is at the top, followed by the significant details that help you understand the overview above them and at the bottom you have general and background information, which will contain much more detail and allow the reader or viewer to dive deeper (think of the headline, subheading, and body of a news story). One of the most useful ones is the inverted pyramid (see image). When designing a dashboard, it’s important to follow some kind of organizing principle. Logical Layout: the Inverted Pyramidĭisplay the most significant insights on the top part of the dashboard, trends in the middle, and granular details in the bottom. Of course, ad hoc investigation will obviously take longer but the most important metrics, the ones that are most frequently needed for the dashboard user during her workday, should immediately pop from the screen. When designing a dashboard, try to follow the five-second rule - this is the amount of time you or the relevant stakeholder should need to find the information you’re looking for upon examining the dashboard. This means that if you’re scanning the information for minutes, this could indicate a problem with your dashboard’s visual layout. Your dashboard should be able to answer your most frequently asked business questions at a glance. Your dashboard should provide the relevant information in about 5 seconds. Tables in the bottom add very little in the way of insightsīy applying the following good dashboard design principles, this dashboard could have been improved dramatically.No organizing principle behind the visual layout - widgets seem to be strewn randomly.Basic questions such as “what is the total amount of sales?” take much more than 5 seconds to answer.Too many widgets (about 30 of them) create visual clutter.Which poor design choices are immediately noticeable?
#PRINCIPLE APP DATA VISUALIZATION FULL#
Get the full guide to data visualization including checklists and cheat sheets. We will proceed to present four of these principles, and how you can start applying them to your dashboards right now.įirst, let’s examine how a poorly designed dashboard might look: While each data dashboard has its own requirements, limitations, and goals, there are certain guidelines that are almost always relevant for dashboard creation. Some users might need to be able to see a more granular view of the data - others could suffice with an overview. Reveals details as needed: we want each viewer to have access to the data they need - no less but also no more.Expresses the meaning of the data: the chosen data visualizations need to correctly represent the data and the information you want to extract from it.This is where the visual layout of a dashboard plays a crucial role. Tells a clear story: we want to be able to connect data to its context in the business and to answer the viewer’s questions.We want to take all this complexity and make it simple. Makes the complex simple: we have lots of information, lots of data that changes all the time and different analytical needs and questions.
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