The purpose of a dashboard is to tell a story. In the scheme of human history, hieroglyphs, the Bible, epic poems, theatre, comic books, and even social media are a few of the many different media through which we recount events to each other. All stories have one of the several primary purposes, to teach values or historical lessons, create culture, motivate people to take action, or entertain, to name a few.
Knowing the purpose of the story that you are telling is imperative to making it memorable. Good stories have several important attributes, which should be kept in mind when you are working. Some of these attributes are as follows:
- They're simple and focused
- They create an emotional response
- Listeners can relate to the actors in them
- They have good, real data
It's a good idea to take a few minutes to think about the story that you want to tell before you even create a new dashboard. Think about the stories that are the most memorable to you and the data points in them. Then, put yourself in the place of your listener. Design with your listener in mind. If you can develop a list of the top three data questions that you think are most important to your listener and then design a dashboard that focuses on answering them simply and evocatively, then your dashboard will likely be impactful.
With Tableau Public, you can tell stories in a variety of ways—with individual visualizations, well-formed dashboards, and story points. You can also integrate your work in Tableau Public into other tools by using the JavaScript API (which is beyond the scope of this book). But just because there are many tools and options at your disposal, it does not mean that you should make your dashboards overly complicated. It's actually just the opposite. Good journalism focuses on keeping stories simple, and you should use the same ethos with your stories. Just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should do it.
It truly applies well to designing dashboards; less is more. Knowing your user and their questions is fundamental to a good design, and everything else flows from that.
In Tableau Public, you can make a dashboard from one or more visualizations, and you can add images, free text, filters, legends, parameters, links, and even embedded web pages. All of these capabilities are designed to enable you to create a data story that has the right context for your dashboard, both for the consumer and for its relativity to other events and data elements. While you can publish individual worksheets to Tableau Public, we encourage you to organize your work into dashboards so that you can guide your user through a complete story.
In this chapter, we will discuss some best practices for dashboard creation, the elements of a dashboard, and how to navigate the dashboard worksheet. The following topics will be discussed in this chapter:
- The design process
- Best practices of dashboard design
- The elements of a successful dashboard
- Creating a dashboard
- Adding context with titles, images, links, and tooltips
In the next chapter, we will discuss dashboard filters, actions, and parameters, and after that, we will discuss publishing your work to Tableau Public.
The purpose of Tableau Public is to help you tell data stories interactively. Dashboard design, like view design, should tell a concise story that flows from one element to the next. When you are first starting your journey of dashboard design in Tableau Public, you should expect it to be an iterative process in which you design dashboards and revise them over time, often with input from other people. You might also find it helpful to draw out dashboards before building them in Tableau Public. Leave room and time for experimentation when building your dashboard.
You may find that more views, or different views, are needed in order to tell your story. Pulling various views together into a dashboard sometimes exposes flaws in the initial design. In that case, go back and change or add to your views, and then come back to the dashboard design process.