KPI Examples. Dashboard Examples. Metric Stack Newsletter. Help Center. Contact Us. Why should you use a dashboard Dashboards versus reports: What's the difference? Benefits of using a dashboard for your business How to pick which metrics and KPIs to track on a dashboard Let's get in to it! What is a data dashboard? Why should you use a dashboard? Dashboards versus reports: What's the difference?
Benefits of using a dashboard for your business Dashboards serve different purposes for different roles. Consistent and timely cross-functional communication Dashboards allow everyone in the business to make and validate business decisions and create greater synergy across the organization. Which metrics and KPIs should I put on a dashboard? Dashboards are versatile, too, which makes them useful for any industry or department.
What kind of business questions does my dashboard need to address? What type of dashboard do I use to display my data? Will my dashboard be interactive for readers? For example: What is our Customer Acquisition Cost? Display this metric on your dashboard for a quick answer. Are we filling our sales funnel with fewer leads this month compared to last month?
Display this metric on your dashboard and add a comparison value to get the full picture. Is our Website Bounce Rate on-par with the industry standard? Metric Stack Newsletter New benchmarks, trending metrics content, and tips and tricks to help you level up your analytics. Delivered to your inbox every week. Your dashboard should be beautiful in order to pass that test. At the end of the day, dashboards are designed to communicate information to humans and humans are emotional creatures.
Your design has a great impact on the consumer of it. You should also consider getting a second eye on your dashboard before you present it. And no, using the same defaults templates that your tool offers has been done before and will typically not impress users looking at your dashboard. After the initial excitement you may be able to generate with a good design, to make sure your users keep on using the dashboard over time you must have the right content in it.
It must give users data they can use in their decision making process or data they relate to emotionally. But more on that later! You can destroy all of your efforts with a missing or incorrect chart type. Dashboard-centric charts and visualizations fall into four primary categories that are related to the aim of the visualization: relationship, distribution, composition, and comparison.
It is important to understand the aim of the metric before picking the chart type that you want. Here we will talk about a few of the most common types and their aims:. Line charts are great when it comes to displaying patterns of change across a continuum. They are compact, clear, and precise. Line charts format is common and familiar to most people so they can easily be analyzed at a glance.
Choose bar charts if you want to quickly compare items in the same category, for example, page views by country. Again such charts are easy to understand, clear, and compact. They rank low in precision because users find it difficult to accurately compare the sizes of the pie slices.
Although such charts can be instantly scanned and users will notice the biggest slice immediately, there can be a problem in terms of scale resulting in the smallest slices being so small that they even cannot be displayed. A good practice when using pie charts is to only do it with a couple of slices, this way, you make sure that the information is easy to understand and will bring value to your dashboard.
However, they work well when you have a lot of metrics and you want to show only the trends. They are rapidly scannable and very compact. They aim to find the correlation between two variables. When the data is distributed on the chart, the results show the correlation to be positive, negative, or nonexistent. Gauge charts are valuable visualizations to provide context. The advantage of these charts lays in the fact that they are easy to interpret as they use various colors to represent different values of the same metric.
They are usually used in situations where the expected value is already known, this way the different stakeholders that use the dashboard can understand where they stand just by looking at the gauge chart. For example, to monitor the sales target or sales growth.
Most experts agree that bubble charts are not fit for dashboards. They require too much mental effort from their users even when it comes to reading simple information in a context. Due to their lack of precision and clarity, they are not very common and users are not familiar with them.
As mentioned, depending on what you want to communicate or show, there is a chart type to suit your goals. Placing your aims into one of the 4 primary categories above will help you make an informed decision on the chart type. Here is a graphic that will serve as a resume and guide to help you pick the right chart type depending on what you want to show:. Dashboard best practices in design concern more than just good metrics and well-thought-out charts.
The next step is the placement of charts on a dashboard. If your dashboard is visually organized , users will easily find the information they need. Poor layout forces users to think more before they grasp the point, and nobody likes to look for data in a jungle of charts and numbers. The general rule is that the key information should be displayed first — at the top of the screen, upper left-hand corner.
There is some scientific wisdom behind this placement — most cultures read their written language from left to right and top to bottom, which means that people intuitively look at the upper-left part of a page first, no matter if you're developing an enterprise dashboard design or a smaller-scaled within the department - the rule is the same.
Another useful dashboard layout principle is to start with the big picture. The major trend should be visible at a glance. After this revealing first overview, you can proceed with more detailed charts. Remember to group the charts by theme with the comparable metrics placed next to each other. This analytics dashboard best practice will enable you to present your data in the most meaningful way and clear to the end-user.
One of the best practices for dashboard design focuses on simplicity. However, try to use those frills sparingly. Frames, backgrounds, effects, gridlines… Yes, these options might be useful sometimes, but only when there is a reason for applying them. Moreover, be careful with your labels or legend and pay attention to the font, size, and color.
Take the Data-Ink ratio concept introduced by Edward Tufte as a guide. If data-ink would be removed from the image, the graphic would lose the content. The data-ink ratio is the proportion of ink used to present the relevant data compared to the total amount of ink in the graph. The goal here is to keep the less relevant information non-data-ink out of your dashboards as much as possible as they distract from the main intention of the visuals.
You can check out our example on how to create a market research report , where we focused on simplicity and the most important findings presented on 3 different reporting dashboard designs.
Additionally, applying shadows can be quite an effect since it highlights some areas of the dashboard and gives more depth. Since the point is to keep it simple, don't overdo it and use it when you really need it.
Designing a dashboard should be a well-thought process but the end-user should see a simple data story with the main points highlighted and the points should be immediately clear. If this is not respected, more questions will arise about the dashboard itself rather than discussing the points that you're trying to make and the story you're trying to present.
This leads us to our next point. Continuing on simplicity, rounding the numbers on your dashboard design should be also one of the priorities since you don't want your audience to be flooded with numerous decimal places. Yes, you want to present details but, sometimes, too many details give the wrong impression. If you want to present your conversion rate with 5 more decimal places, it would make sense to round the number and avoid too many number-specific factors.
Or, if you want to present your revenue, you don't need to do so by going into cents. Especially if you want to implement executive dashboard best practices, where strategic information doesn't need to represent every operational detail of a certain number. The latter may exaggerate minor elements, in this case, cents, which, for an effective data story, isn't really necessary in your dashboard design process. Without a shadow of a doubt, this is one of the most important of all dashboard design best practices.
This particular point may seem incongruous to what we have said up to this point, but there are options to personalize and customize your creations to your preferences. The interactive nature of data dashboards means that you can let go of PowerPoint-style presentations from the 90s. The modern dashboard is minimalist and clean.
Flat design is really trendy nowadays. Now, when it comes to color, you can choose to stay true to your company identity same colors, logo, fonts or go for a totally different color palette. The important thing here is to stay consistent and not use too many different colors — an essential consideration when learning how to design a dashboard.
You can choose two to three colors, and then play with gradients. A common mistake is using highly saturated colors too frequently. Dashboard design best practices always stress consistency when it comes to your choice of colors. With this in mind, you should use the same color for matching items across all charts. Thanks to this, your users will only have to note that higher-intensity colors symbolize variable displays of a particular quality, item, or element, which is far easier than memorizing multiple sets of random colors.
Again, creating a dashboard that users can understand at a glance is your main aim here. In the example above, manufacturing analytics are presented in a neat production dashboard, where a 'dark' theme is chosen after careful consideration of a few colors.
In some cases, information displayed in too much detail only serves to lead to distraction. Real-time data serves to paint a picture of a general situation or a trend. Most project management dashboards must only be updated periodically — on a weekly, daily, or hourly basis.
After all, it is the right data that counts the most. Moreover, you can implement smart alarms so that the dashboard itself notifies you if any business anomalies occur.
0コメント