InetSoft Webinar: Questions about Dashboard Design Principles

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Building a Winning Dashboard" The speaker is Abhishek Gupta, sales engineer at InetSoft.

So what I'll do next now is I'll open the floor for some questions about dashboard design principles. If there are some questions, you are welcome to type them into the gotowebinar question panel, and I'll try to address them within the remaining time.

Okay, so a couple of questions here. I should have probably mentioned at the beginning, will we get the recording of this presentation? Then, the answer is yes. The recording will be available and will be sent out to you, everybody that registered to this webinar in a follow up email in a couple of days.

So there's another question here about how to specifically design and create dashboards in InetSoft? So, there is a great webinar on our webinar space on the website, I don't remember the exact name of it, but if you go to webinar page, it will be quite clear and done a few months ago, it actually shows you moving from data to dashboard showing you step by step how you create the dashboard. So definitely there is this type of webinar available to you if you want to watch it.

So there's a question here about the choice of a data visualization that we use on our dashboard, specifically, should I be using gauges and other types of visualization that help with the visual appeal that the people perceive? I think the answer to that is it really depends on the environment you are operating.

We see manufacturing organizations, where the manufacturing device is actually used, gauges and needles, so it could make a lot of sense to use radial gauges on those dashboards. Typically, radial gauges are not great from the point of view of the real estate they consume on your dashboard. They take a lot of space, they don't convey a lot of information.

So I would rather use bullet graphs or other ways of visualizing information rather than using radial gauges, but again, it could make sense depending on the environment. You need to take different factors into consideration when you design a dashboard and as I mentioned earlier, there is a whole lot of best practices around the right type of visualization to choose from.

In InetSoft, we give that power to the users to be able to switch between the different types of visuals on the fly, so they can decide for themselves, but definitely with the original design you want to get the right visual from the get go. One more thing I would mention about that, and that's related to another question we had here around training.

View live interactive examples in InetSoft's dashboard and visualization gallery.

As part of our training courses, we definitely talk about not just technology and how to implement a different data visualization solution using InetSoft, but also about data visualization best practices, and we talk about the right choice of visualization for the right data. So there is an unrelated question here to the topic of today's webinar and a few questions about that, so we will get to all of the other questions that are unrelated to today's topic or that we don't have time to get to, with follow up emails.

Specifically that question is, can we visualize data from Hadoop in InetSoft? The answer is yes, we can definitely connect to different Hadoop environments. There are different ways to do it. We can connect to a Hive or Impala and many others. So the answer to that is, is yes.