Blog II: Dashboard Design

Dashboard Design

So … I had been thinking for few days now what will grab my reader’s attention, what should my BI blog topic be? My thoughts ranged from star schemas to balance scorecards to data warehousing, and finally to dashboards. Truly, each and every one of these topics would have been a hit as all are trending topics and are raising interest in the tech and business world. But, I had to decide on one … And can you guess what I picked? Well, maybe if you know my current project/task load, then you would know that I picked Dashboards as the winner. Just a short story of why I decided on dashboards. I was recently asked at my current job to come up with a dashboard design that displays departmental KPIs which need to have the capability to be sliced and diced and drilled down to be able to examine and see more detail when anomalies and inconsistencies arise.

I would bet that most of us have heard the word dashboard – for some of you is a car or airplane dashboard, and for others is actually an operational or analytical dashboard. But what is the definition of a dashboard? According to Stephen Few, a dashboards is “a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives, consolidated and arranged on a single screen so that information can be monitored at a glance.”

I can attest, from my own experiences and literature research that dashboards are gaining their popularity and every organization wants or has one. Dashboards are a great tool that gives executives and other interested parties great visibility and insight on what exactly is going on in their business. Dashboards can show trending of overall expense/revenue/profit of an organization compared to budget or benchmark, product lead times for manufacturing organization, patient wait times for hospitals compared to benchmark, etc. So, all of these portray quantitative information … So, do dashboards only contain quantitative measures?  Isn’t that boring? Well no, they do not only contain quantitative measures. Dashboards can have various widgets, such as spark lines, text labels, gauges, etc.

Now, let’s discuss characteristics of an effective dashboard and review some of the pitfalls that need to be avoided.

The big point here is that dashboards need to provide the big picture of the company’s performance. Prominence needs to be given to major metrics and attention should be easily drawn to measures that show poor performance in comparison to the targets.

Now, let’s mention few of the common pitfalls discussed by Stephen Few:
1. Exceeding the boundaries of a single screen – It is VERY IMPORTANT that all of the information should fit on a single screen
2. Displaying excessive detail or precision – Information should not be displayed in more detail and precision than necessary
3. Choosing inappropriate media to display – Think about what media is the best way to represent your performance, do not just go for the fancier widgets that do not easily portray the picture
4. Using poorly designed display media – Design the components so they communication information efficiently, effectively, and clearly, without distractions
5. Expressing measures indirectly – If you want to portray the variance between actual and budgeted revenue, then rather than showing the two attributes separately and having the viewer do the calculation, display the variance directly on the dashboard

I hope you, the reader, have gained a better understanding of dashboards, several important characteristics and pitfalls and how they might benefit you and your organization.

References

Few, S. (2005). Common Pitfalls in Dashboard Design.

Few, S. (2005). Dashboard Design: Beyond Meters, Gauges, and Traffic Lights. Business Intelligence Journal , 18-24.

Ram, S. (2015). Dashboard design and its use for analysis. Module 4