Whitepaper. Dashboard Design Tips & Tricks.

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1 Whitepaper Dashboard Design Tips & Tricks

2 Introduction Dashboards are popular but, let s be honest, many of them are useless. Either because they are visually boring or because zealous design too often overshadows the quality information they should display. There is a right balance to strike and our team of experienced designers and data scientists teamed up to narrow it down to what they believe to be the 8 Laws of Dashboard Design. Many of the below rules of thumb are easily understandable and you don t have to be a PhD in Analytics to follow them. So, go ahead, share them with colleagues, customers and partners and let s together, help the world go from ineffective dashboards to effective engaging data work!

3 1. Think Outside the Cell There s a reason you chose to build dashboard rather than slapping together a handful of Excel bar charts. Finding a better way to present data is the whole idea, so break out of the Excel mindset. Know how your numbers stack up: pie charts are great when you re dealing with percentages, a creative X-Y scatter plot will display correlation (and outliers) well, and population data often fits into a standard normal distribution-like curve. Similar numerical values are suitable for a bar chart, but for widely disparate number sets you might have to find a more creative solution. Space and usability is everything here. Our favorite approach comes from the teachings of Ed Tufte (watch his interview in the Washington Post here). Dashboards should make people smarter and should be an excuse to celebrate analytical thinking. We, of course, believe that effective dashboards win over beautiful. An ineffective dashboard, in our humble opinion, is one that looks

4 more like art than information (see a poor example here). Although appealing to the eye, the graphic has gone way too far and fails to provide immediate value. How should you evaluate visual assets? Ask yourself if your dashboard gives viewers the ability to pick comparative and correlative analysis without much work. 2. People Are Needy. Deal with it. Most government-run websites look like something a teenager designed using Geocities back in Not so with the revamped Gov.uk, which is why their Design Principles should be required reading for anyone who has to build a dashboard. The design process must start with identifying and thinking about real user needs. We should design around those not around the way the official process is at the moment. We must understand those needs thoroughly interrogating data, not just making assumptions and we should remember that what users ask for is not always what they need.

5 Like the Gov.uk team, keep your design needs-oriented. What will make life easier for the person who uses this dashboard? Normally, we re not starting from scratch users are already using our services. This means we can learn from real world behaviour. We should do this, but we should make sure we continue this into the build and development process prototyping and testing with real users on the live web. We should understand the desire paths of how we are designing with data and use them in our designs. Again, data is the reason you re building the dashboard in the first place, and data can help you build a better dashboard. Gareth Rushgrove offers numerous suggestions to this end.

6 3. This is not an 80 s Rave Bright, intense, or neon colors don t just make the screen look busier, they also end up vying for attention with actual data in the viewer s brain; it s hard to process a pie chart displaying customer segmentation when your retinas are screaming NEON PINK NEON PINK NEON PINK! Use three or fewer colors, and pick shades along a dark-light scale to make your dashboard more colorblind-friendly. While we re on the subject, use colors suitable for your data. Representing quarterly energy savings in shades of green is okay, representing life insurance claims data in lime green is not. When in doubt, follow Liz Fosslien s rules.

7 4. Keep Communication Lines Open By the time you re done building a dashboard, you re probably fairly familiar with the data sets you re working with, which is great. Not everyone who looks at it will have the same benefit, so please, please use labels. Tell me what each axis means, and whether 50 on your number scale means $50 or $50,000. And if you re presenting this dashboard to someone in Canada or Australia, go ahead and specify that you mean USD. 5. Negative Space is a Positive Someone, somewhere is running around telling dashboard creators that white space is bad. This is a lie. White space is good--think of it as the visual version of pausing between topics during a conversation. You don t need to fill this negative space with logos, taglines, motivational quotes, or photos of LOLcats.

8 6. Nobody Is Fooled By 3D Back in the Windows 95 days, 3D was pretty much the most advanced graphics work the average PC could create, and it was forgivable to use the occasional 3D bar graph to liven up a presentation. The problem is, 3D renderings of important data are either a.) hard to interpret accurately b.) distracting c.) both

9 Again, the whole point of a dashboard is to present information in a way that makes it easy to interpret in a single glance. Flat is good. Flat is visually simple. As a corollary to this rule, shadows and gradients are also a no-no. Let your data do the talking and save the special effects for Hollywood. 7. Data is Still Boss You ve got a great idea forza killer candlestick chart overlaying a scatter plot that will absolutely change the world of data visualization forever. That s cute. But don t build it into the very next dashboard you touch if you have to squeeze, maneuver, or restructure your data just to do it. As with the dashboard s sexier younger sister, the infographic, the info should come first. Besides, the world just isn t ready for your chart-blending brilliance.

10 8. There Is No Clean Plate Club for Dashboards For much the same reason that you stop eating when you feel full, include the data you think is relevant in your dashboard--and leave the rest alone. Dashboards aren t meant to be a visual version of all the data you have. So add the information relevant to your goals. Put the most important stuff at the top, because that s what you ll want to see first and check most frequently. If you have to scroll down to see the rest of the dashboard, that s okay too (because we live in a world where there is no fold.) You don t get bonus points for using all your data; you get bonus points for building a useful and flexible dashboard.

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