Designing Great Dashboards - Examples and Tips

As enterprises and other organizations look to make sense of the all the data available to them, dashboards are being positioned as the solution to their problems. However, a dashboard needs special attention to the visual design or the dashboard will fail to meet expectations. If not carefully designed, a new dashboard can leave consumers unsatisfied, frustrated, confused, and even overwhelmed.

A dashboard is often the first screen that a user sees in your UI. The importance of visual design and data visualizations is high. Beautiful dashboards are worthless however, if the presented information isn’t useful to the user to accomplish their tasks.

Where Should We Place The Data?

What are the critical must-see or must-do items? Give these items prominent placement and stronger visual treatments. What is the likely flow of a user’s focus? Graphic elements pull users’ focus downstream. Is there a logical grouping scheme? Express groupings visually. Would a user want to compare some data with other data? Place comparative data side by side.

You need to decide how to arrange the data on a page—not based on the aesthetics of the page, but on the ways in which the information flow must support users’ workflow's. An information dashboard is not eye candy. It needs to support some user goal or interaction. So you need to determine what users’ next actions might be and design a dashboard to accommodate them.