Dashboards are a special kind of data visualization. They are widely used to monitor website analytics, business intelligence metrics, and brand presence in social media, among many other things. Dashboards are especially difficult to design, because a great amount of information should be displayed in a limited amount of space.
In this chapter, we will define what a dashboard is and discuss some of the strategies and design patterns that can help us design an effective dashboard. We will design and create a dashboard to monitor the performance of students in a class.
Before we create our dashboard, it will be useful to clarify what a dashboard is. A quick search on Google Images will reveal that there isn't any consistent definition of what a dashboard is. Most of the results are a collection of charts, tables, gauges, and indicators that seem intended to monitor business performance, website analytics, and presence of a brand in social media, among many other things. Stephen Few, a specialist in business intelligence and information design, provides a great definition of dashboards:
A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives, which is consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.
This definition has several implications. First, dashboards are visual displays of information. A dashboard can contain text elements, but it's mainly a visual display. Well-designed graphics and charts are a highly effective medium to communicate quantitative information. Suppose we have a list with the monthly sales of a person in value and units sold. We can display this information in a table, as follows:
Series of sales shown as a table
We can also create a line chart with the same information. The following image displays the same data in a visual form. We have two lines and their corresponding axes, one for the units sold and another for the value of the monthly sales.
Series of sales, this time as a line chart
In the line chart, we can easily spot seasonal changes in the sales, find the minimum or maximum value, and identify patterns and changes in sales. Of course, if we need precision, we will need the table, but if we need to detect changes quickly, the chart is a better choice.
Dashboards should be designed with a purpose in mind. If our dashboard shows general information, it won't be useful. We should know what kind of decisions will be made, which problems need to be detected, and what information will help the dashboard users make decisions and take action.
The dashboard should display the most important information that is needed to achieve its purpose. This means that it should gather all the relevant data, perhaps from different sources, to help decision makers detect problems.
Note
The previous definition of dashboards states that the information in a dashboard should be arranged in a single screen, or more generally, the dashboard should fit in the eye span of the user. This is important in order to provide an overall view. The information should be visible at all times, and the user shouldn't have to scroll the page to view a chart or click on something to have a modal window with additional information.
In the next section, we will design and create a dashboard to monitor the performance of students in a class. We will state the purpose of our dashboard, list the relevant information that we need, organize this information in sections, and create charts for each section in order to finally organize our information to help the user detect problems and take actions to solve them.