Designing dashboards

Everyone seems to want to have a dashboard to show below their data, but most are not great.

Problem

An example of a crime dashboard. No data, confusing and looks uninviting.

Solution

How we did it?

Improve design skills:

By reading Stephen Few's book 'Information Dashboard Design'. Five important design principals:

• dashboards have the most important information.
• fit on a single screen.
• importance of layout - making sure that it's obvious where to start, and where to go.
• top left for important information vs bottom right for least important.
• bullet graphics allow for the comparison of data in small space.

Bad dashboards have:

• no comparison of data.
• inappropriate graphs with meaningless graphical variety.
• misuse colour, have lots of it, and emphasis the wrong data.

Technology:

• Vanilla Excel and/or MicroCharts Excel add-on.

Cost:

• time - first time: 3 wks from reading Few's book to final dashboard.
• money - MicroCharts £190.

How you can do it?

microCharts - create dashboards with Excel add-on http://www.bonavistasystems.com

Few, S (2006). Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data

Alexander, M (2008). Excel 2007 Dashboards & Reports For Dummies. Wiley Publishing

Evaluation

Strengths:

• people are actually using them.
• more productive meetings.

Weaknesses:

• knowing where to start on the page.
• can focus on the negative.
• Excel can be restrictive in design terms.
• everyone becomes an expert on design.
• are the indicators useful to understand the issues.

Re-design:

Stephen Few kindly suggested some changes to the crime dashboard above which we have incorporated into later designs:

• You might consider placing the values, which currently appear next to each bar, just to the right of the labels (e.g., "Hinckley and Bosworth 158") instead. This will create a tabular display of the numbers, which will be easier to scan and read and won't clutter the plot area of the graph.
• The numbers that appear in the BS Comparator Crime Types table should be right aligned and the column headers should be correspondingly right aligned. This will make them slightly easier to scan, read, and compare.

View Lisa Cunningham's Anti-Social Behaviour dashboard which won an award in XLCubed's dashboard challenge. The dashboard aims to provide an at a glance view of the level and trend of ASB. The judges commented that it "does an excellent job."