So You Want to Be a DashBoard/Scorecard Designer?
In my last post, I talked about the technical skills necessary to build effective dashboards and scorecards. The emphasis was on providing users with accurate and complete data. This post focuses on an almost equally difficult challenge... “telling the right story” with your charts and reports. A dashboard, at its simplest level, is about connecting pictures to tell a story... with few or no words. Information needs to be displayed in an easy to understand (and easy to react to) layout. This task is especially challenging with dashboards and scorecards because the audience is often senior management and the data is a checkpoint or “pulse“ on the business. So, how do you build an effective dashboard or scorecard solution?
There are lots of resources available to help you learn the best practices associated with dashboard design. One that I particularly like is Stephen Few's “Information Dashboard Design”. It has lots of great tips and contains plenty of examples to spur some creative ideas. Two lists from the book that are particularly worth noting are...
Thirteen Common Mistakes in Dashboard Design
- Exceeding the boundaries of a single screen
- Supplying inadequate context for the data
- Displaying excessive detail or precision
- Choosing a deficient measure
- Choosing inappropriate display media
- Introducing meaningless variety
- Using poorly designed display media
- Encoding quantitative data inaccurately
- Arranging the data poorly
- Highlighting important data ineffectively or not at all
- Cluttering the display with useless decoration
- Misusing or overusing color
- Designing an unattractive visual display
Characteristics of a Well-Designed Dashboard
- Exceptionally well organized
- Condensed, primarily in the form of summaries and exceptions
- Specific to and customized for the dashboard's audience and objectives
- Displayed using concise and often small media that communicate the data and its message in the clearest and most direct way possible