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Your dashboard design shouldn't just be random. Incorporating best practices will ensure your data can be analyzed efficiently and taken action.
Your dashboard of business should be intuitive to use and an invaluable decision-making resource. Here we explore 25 design principles to assist with data-driven success in business. Before we dive in, let's consider several reasons that an effective dashboard is vital to analytics success.
Dashboards Are Important For Companies In The Mid-Market
As previously noted, dashboards are powerful tools for businesses and organizations that help inform informed decisions by providing key data visualization.
Dashboarding may sound straightforward in theory, but in practice, the process involves much more. User engagement must always come first when planning the dashboarding process, so design best practices may provide helpful support.
Follow dashboard design principles to maximize the analytical power of your tools, providing an accessible way for users to access key insights intuitively and interactively.
Here are a few other advantages associated with optimizing design.
- You'll see in the next section how a dashboard can be designed to engage audiences and make the process more efficient. By telling your data story interactively and in a personalized way to each user, you can keep them engaged and help to make the analytical process more efficient.
- It is important to convey the information clearly and concisely. Displaying data on an endless Excel spreadsheet with tables and formulas or displaying numbers within a static document can be confusing for employees who are not technically minded. They may interpret numbers wrongly and develop incorrect strategies. Dashboards are designed to eliminate this burden by presenting critical data that is easily accessible. Users can then extract useful insights from the dashboard and take informed decisions without the risk of misinterpretation or error.
- A well-designed dashboard will help you identify trends and patterns. Making good decisions can be a great benefit. You can identify patterns and trends in data by analyzing graphs and charts using interactive filters, a clear layout and an intuitive interface. This will help you to develop your critical business strategies. A dashboard optimized over time can give your business a competitive edge as all the potential hidden in your data is revealed.
What Are The Best Practices For Designing A Dashboard?
These best dashboard design practices will equip you with everything needed to craft stunning dashboards with long-term success in mind.
Dashboards that excel for their users must be clear, interactive and straightforward for user consumption.
Dashboards that offer great user experiences typically communicate information quickly by employing effective data visualization techniques to convey it quickly to readers at a glance; users then can extract insights, recognize trends and recognize improvement opportunities quickly using user-friendly online data analyses. Prioritize relevant data while considering usability considerations as you follow your core business objectives when building such dashboards UXs.
Dashboard design principles work best when applied as part of an organized process, so we will review these design principles to ensure no critical steps have been missed.
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Consider Your Audience
Considerations should always include your audience when designing dashboard best practices.
To create the optimal analytical tool, you must know who will use them and make it specifically with them in mind.
Always put yourself in your audience's shoes when considering information presentation style and devices used for access.
A dashboard may be used while moving, at work quietly or for large audiences. These factors will all influence its visual display style and form.
Overly-complex charts may cause users to spend longer analyzing data than expected.
Dashboards must highlight data analysis that adds value, eliminating additional calculations required by users in finding what they need from charts; visualize yourself as your target audience when creating these charts!
As you design the dashboard, keep your audience in mind at all times - the goal should always be making data more easily accessible and understandable.
We advise using simpler designs when targeting traditional audiences; ask those using your dashboard directly about any information they require now for best results.
Dashboard design templates effectively provide data to the right audiences quickly and conveniently - especially useful for executives such as high-level execs or vice presidents.
What data is a user looking for, and why would that information help them better comprehend their current situation? A ratio can help illustrate an increase or decrease in value more clearly; an evolution and trend indicator makes your metrics even more engaging for an audience regardless of whether they focus on logistics KPIs and procurement metrics.
Read Also: Creating Enterprise-level Software Solutions for Mid-market Companies
Decide Your Goals
Next, an essential principle of dashboard UI design is creating an interaction between user needs, dashboard purposes, and dashboard design goals.
Doing this will allow you to establish goals, whether creating dashboards for clients or internal reports with specific purposes in mind will allow you to answer queries more effectively; just be mindful that not all data may be relevant - failure at this step could render all your efforts futile!
Care should be taken when selecting metrics and data to help reach desired goals.
Answer questions such as what needs to be assessed/measured/timing accordingly in your report's purpose statement (for instance, "what period" and "when", etc.). Knowing this could simplify selecting KPIs; on our next point, we will expand upon this topic further).
Choose Relevant Kpis
Selecting the ideal KPIs for your company is key to creating an effective KPI dashboard.
After setting goals and identifying an audience, choosing KPIs that support those goals becomes paramount in building one.
KPIs can help you develop an informative dashboard relating to your business. At our library, we have carefully selected 250 examples of KPIs to assist in making decisions more easily.
KPIs serve as key metrics that measure performance for companies, industries and platforms--retail being one such sector where this practice may be seen most clearly.
Retail KPIs include total sales volume and basket average over time to help retailers quickly identify demand changes; it simplifies identifying areas of poor performance so adjustments can be made accordingly (if any adjustments need to be).
Use Your Data To Tell A Story
Now that your dashboard UX design has been completed successfully, it is time to develop data stories.
Dashboard storytelling, or dashboard visualizations, as they're more commonly known, is the visual presentation of data to enable greater comprehension of business goals and strategies. Through effective storytelling, you can ensure your message reaches its destination without miscommunication.
An effective data-driven story can bridge the divide between those more technical in their approach to analytics and those unfamiliar with analytics.
As Forbes states in their article, "Storytellers are using these tales of tales to educate team members who find data analysis challenging or inaccessible."
Designing a dashboard beforehand is one way to ensure you can communicate data efficiently.
Focusing your charts based on the audience you are targeting and their desired goals can provide the design makes sense and generate useful reports tailored to users' understanding levels and ultimate goals.
Please Provide Context
How can a dashboard inform us if its numbers are good or bad, normal or otherwise? Without comparing values to make sense of them, dashboards become meaningless without telling us any actions are needed or whether any are needed in general.
A management dashboard would use metrics at a high-level and visually present its narrative through charts or visual graphs.
Even if some information may seem obvious to you, your audience might not. Make sure each chart includes titles and names for easy identification by all.
Also, add comparison values that use common methods, such as against an established target, prior period value, or projected future value comparison. It is an invaluable design tip!
Do Not Try To Put All Information On One Page
On our list of dashboard design tips, the next end will focus on information. A successful dashboard should accurately target its audience with precision.
Do not design dashboards that fit all audiences evenly; consider that your audience has varied requirements. Sales managers don't require the same data as marketing specialists, HR departments or logistics analysts; thus, it makes sense to divide it all between tabs on a dashboard to facilitate easier information search.
Your dashboard marketing could be divided into sections representing different parts of your website, like product pages, blog posts or terms and conditions.
Instead of forcing visitors to click endlessly through tabs and filters created using multiple tabs/filters/drill-downs etc. - consider making templates specific for every position using dashboard creator programs, as this would save both time and energy for both sides!
While it might appear daunting initially, creating personalized dashboards for every role reduces the need for tabs, filters and drill-downs.
Choose The Correct Type Of Dashboard
A second best practice is to know the kind of dashboard you are building based on your analytical goals.
Each dashboard must be tailored to a specific user group to help the recipients make business decisions. Only when information is actionable is it valuable? The information must be actionable by the user. Designers who use the best dashboard principles should be able to identify and distinguish essential information from non-essential data to increase user productivity.
Here are five types of dashboards that you can use to reference for your main business activities:
- Strategic: This dashboard is designed to monitor a company's long-term strategies by analyzing and benchmarking critical trends-based data.
- Operational: An intelligence tool used to measure and monitor processes or manage operations on a more short-term or immediate basis.
- The dashboards are designed to provide a comprehensive view of the data, allowing analysts to dig into it and gain insights that will help executives progress in their company.
- This type is for analytics that is platform specific. If you want to track your performance on social media, you could use certain metrics to create dashboard that focuses only on this channel.
- The tactical dashboards, which are information-rich, can be used by mid-management to formulate growth strategies that take into account trends, departmental strengths and weaknesses, as shown in the following example:
If you plan to print or display your dashboard, ensure all the information is contained on one page.
Later, we'll talk more about that!
Charts Of All Types Are Available
An important consideration in selecting charts and graphs is selecting those appropriate to convey data effectively.
Failing to do this could result in miscommunication of that message to target audiences; to choose an apt visualization method.
Dashboard charts and visualizations can be divided into four categories depending on their goal: Relationship, Distribution, Composition and Comparison.
When selecting the type of chart required for any purpose, it is imperative that we first understand this goal fully before choosing our chart type of choice; here, we discuss some types of charts as well as their uses in more depth.
Line charts provide an effective means of depicting changes across an infinite spectrum.
Their visual simplicity enables people to analyze this type of chart with just one glance quickly. Bar charts provide an effective solution when you need to quickly compare items of equal significance, like page views per country.
They're compact, user-friendly and clear.
Pie charts may not be ideal. Pies cannot provide users with an accurate comparison of pie slice sizes.
While such charts are easily scannable and visible to most readers immediately, scale limitations might prevent smaller slices from showing. When creating pie charts for use on dashboards, it's wise to limit how many slices there are in one diagram to keep things user-friendly and easily read by visitors.
Sparklines typically lack scales, making users unable to identify individual values.
Sparklines are ideal when there are many metrics simultaneously, but you only want a quick snapshot. Furthermore, these compact charts can easily be scanned.
Scatterplots provide users with more knowledge and an advanced form of visualization to determine the correlations between variables; their results displayed on graphs demonstrate whether those correlations are positive, negative, or nonexistent.
Visualizations like gauge charts can be especially helpful in providing context.
With their straightforward format and use of colors to represent similar values, these charts make their message simple for viewers and allow the users to quickly assess where their position stands - for sales targets or growth monitoring, for instance.
Experts generally acknowledge the shortcomings of bubble graphs as dashboard components.
Even simple information within context requires too much effort for comprehension; additionally, users do not recognize these graphs due to their inaccuracy and lack of clarity. As noted, you have various chart options to meet your individual needs and goals. An effective method for making this choice involves categorizing goals according to four distinct categories listed here; then using this graphic as both an aid and reminder when selecting your ideal chart type:
Select Your Layout With Care
Designing dashboards with best practices is more than just using good metrics or well-designed charts.
Next, you must decide where the charts will be placed on your dashboard. Users will find information more easily if your dashboard has a visually appealing layout. A poor design makes users think harder before understanding the message.
Nobody likes searching through charts and numbers to find data. It is a general rule that important information must be placed in the upper-left corner of the screen. This placement is based on scientific principles.
Most cultures read written languages from top to left and bottom to up. People, therefore, look to the upper-left corner of the page.
A useful principle for dashboard design is, to begin with the overall picture.
You should see the major trends at first glance. After this first revealing overview, You can move on to more detailed charts. Group the graphs according to theme and place comparable metrics next to one another.
So, the user doesn't need to switch mental gears when looking at a dashboard, such as going from marketing data to sales data and back again. The best way to display your data is to use an analytics dashboard. This will allow you to make it more meaningful to users.
Prioritize Simplicity
Simplicity should always be kept at the forefront when designing a dashboard. While many options for chart creation exist today, and it may be tempting to explore them all at once, try being selective when applying frills like frames, backgrounds, gridlines or effects - only use these when necessary!
Be mindful when creating labels and legends. Take into consideration font size and color when designing charts - you want the chart not to be hidden behind unnecessary decorations like images but still large enough for reading purposes - but do so without wastefully decorating excessive areas with unnecessary decorations like large numbers of images; Edward Tufte popularized this idea of Data Ink instead! Tufte defines data ink as non-erasable (non-destructible) ink to present data graphics.
If data-ink were removed from graphic designs, its meaning would become null and void; non-data ink includes scales labels and edges used as scales & labels and edges respectively, whereas data-ink indicates how many graphs ink was dedicated solely to data; to maximize clarity, it essential that as many non-data ink elements as possible are removed as these may distract viewers from understanding its primary function & purpose.
Shadows add depth and draw the eye directly towards specific sections, accentuating certain parts of your dashboard while accentuating certain points that need emphasizing.
Keep it simple by only employing shadows when necessary - designing a dashboard takes careful thought, yet users must see data stories highlighting key information directly - not cause more confusion around it than necessary! We will address that later.
Round Your Numbers
In keeping with the theme of simplicity, you should also round the numbers to the nearest decimal place.
You don't wish your audience to be bombarded by many decimal points. You want to give details, but sometimes too much detail can create the wrong impression. It makes sense to avoid too many factors when presenting your conversion rate.
If you're giving your income, there is no need to go into cents. It is easier to read and understand 850K than 850 010 25. This is especially true if you are implementing executive dashboards, which don't require that strategic information represent all operational details of a number.
Read Also: Enhancing Business Intelligence for Mid-Market Organizations
Choose A Limited Number Of Colors And Stay With Them
This is, without a doubt, one of the best dashboard design practices. Adding this particular detail to what has been said so far may not seem logical.
Still, you can customize and personalize your creations according to your tastes. Data dashboards are interactive, so you don't need PowerPoint presentations. Modern dashboards are minimalistic and simple.
The flat design has become very popular in recent years. You can either choose to stick to the colors and fonts of your brand (i.e., use the same logos and colors), or you can go with a completely different palette.
It is important to use a limited number of colors and to be consistent. This will help you to learn how to create a dashboard.
Choose two or three colors and play around with the gradients. A mistake that designers often make is to use highly saturated colors.
Users can be instantly drawn to certain data by using intense colors. However, users will feel confused and overwhelmed if the dashboard only contains highly saturated colors. The majority of colors should be toned down.
When choosing colors for your dashboard, the best design practices emphasize consistency.
Use the same color for all matching charts to make dashboards more comprehensible.
This will reduce users' mental work and make dashboards easier to understand. If you want to show items as a series or grouping, don't use random colors. Instead, choose related colors (e.g. lead progressions, grade levels).
Keep the color the same for each item but increase the saturation to make it easier to identify.
This will make it easier for your users to remember the different colors representing a certain quality, element or item.
Your main goal is to create a dashboard your users will understand quickly. Last but not least, we suggest you use caution when choosing "traffic lights" colors. Red is often associated with "stop", "bad", or "bad things", while green means "good", "go", or "good".
This can be very helpful when creating dashboards, but you must use the colors appropriately.
Conclusion
What defines an effective dashboard design? A successful dashboard design must be visually striking and balanced while remaining simplistic and user-friendly, meeting the organization's goals and those who will see it.
Following our top tips for dashboard design provides a proven process for producing visuals that enhance data analysis - it truly showcases business intelligence skills!
Each dashboard should be tailored specifically for a user group to support decision-making processes within businesses and turn digital insights into strategic action plans.
Information that can be put to immediate action by its end user is of true value; accordingly, an end user of dashboard data needs to use its contents to enhance their goals, roles or activities.
Make the best impactful and balanced dashboard designs part of your company's growth and development by following this list of simple steps for creating effective dashboard design that will impress the audience and simplify data analysis.
This way, you will ensure more profit, greater audience reach and a larger market - key ingredients of success for any successful enterprise. If you're wondering which steps must be followed when developing effective dashboard designs, look no further: this article contains answers! This list offers 25 degrees, surefire ways of creating powerful and eye-catching dashboard designs that will impress audiences while simplifying data analysis!
