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Most Dashboards are little more than eye candy. Think of the last Dashboard you saw. Did it have bright colors, pie charts or gadgets that reminded you of an airplane cockpit or high performance race car? Typical Dashboard design seems to try to entertain rather than actually convey important information. Think back to that last Dashboard... Can you think of one important piece of information you took away from it?
A Dashboard’s Job is to Communicate
It needs to display the state of an organization at a single glance as well as be specific to its audience and in a time appropriate manner. While a CEO may need to see weekly updates to the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), the Customer Service Director may need instantaneous status on a Call Center. Most Dashboards fall well short of these goals.
Why the “Big Picture” is Obscured by Design
Dashboards that require scrolling or selecting tabs to view additional information defeat the purpose of understanding your organization in one glance, making it difficult to focus on the big picture. This may be the case of trying to design the ‘one size fits all’ Dashboard.
The use of bright, primary colors (red, blue and yellow) actually make it more difficult to understand the data, especially if those colors are used across the Dashboard to represent different measures – or if you are color blind! Pie charts and 3D graphs are the most ineffective tools for conveying information, yet they are the go-to display on many Dashboards.
The ‘eye candy’ of bright colors and speed dials will quickly get old to the executive who just wants to understand what’s going on with their organization.
If your organization has implemented a Dashboard, ask yourself:
If you don’t think your Dashboard is living up to its job, I recommend reading Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data by Stephen Few. It has a nice list of the most common mistakes made in designing Dashboards, all of which defeat the true purpose – communication!
Posted by Beth Scheidt on Fri - Jul 02, 2010 at 1:26 pm EDT
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