5 Design Principles for More Effective Dashboards
Dashboards
The purpose of dashboards is to provide an efficient solution for organizing and presenting data in a clear, direct manner. If the dashboard fails to meet this purpose, then what purpose is it serving? The top dashboard design principles will help ensure the dashboard is fulfilling its mission of presenting relevant data users can analyze and interpret quickly.
When looking at the most effective dashboard displays, it is clear many use data visualization to represent relevant digital data and track key performance indicators. Additionally, the dashboard should display the information in a scannable format, with the most important data available to users first.
If the dashboard fails to present data in a useful way, making it difficult for users to gain insights, it is a poor dashboard design.
So how do you design a dashboard that helps users make informed decisions? First and foremost, make sure the design follows these 5 dashboard design principles. Here is a closer look.
Key Principles of Effective Dashboards
1. Know Your Audience
One of the most important principles of effective dashboards is to know your digital audience thoroughly. Find out
- Who will use your dashboards?
- Why do they need these dashboards? How will it help them?
- How frequently will they use your dashboards? Daily, weekly, monthly?
- How will they access it? Via email, web portal, TV screen, mobile app, laptops?
- What do they want to see on their dashboards?
- Do they already use some reports, charts & dashboards? If so, ask them for a copy.
2. Focus on Your Message
Each business dashboard is meant to inform end users of something. It may be about evaluating their strategy, or exploring new growth areas, or identifying areas that need improvement.
Whatever the business objective, ensure that you focus on it while designing dashboard, and choose your metrics accordingly. For example, if a Marketing VP needs a dashboard to simply monitor social media marketing campaigns, then there is no point in including something like ’email open rate’ in that dashboard.
Similarly, if your audience is looking for high-level trends then you should probably avoid displaying data-heavy tables and stick to charts & graphs.
3. Arrange Metrics Logically
One of the best principles of effective dashboards is to simply arrange your metrics in a logical manner so that it becomes easy for your audience to consume information.
Organize these metrics as 3 layers. The top layer must contain the most important numbers about your business/department/process, or whatever your dashboard is about.
The middle layer must contain trends and graphs that expand on the above numbers. The bottom layer can contain more similar graphs, or more detailed tabular data.
4. Make it Easy to Use
One of the most ignored principles of effective dashboards, it to make it easy to use. First of all, add relevant context to each dashboard widget by adding chart titles, axis labels, data labels, footnotes and comments.
5. Use Colors Sparingly
Dashboards are highly visual elements. If you use too many colors in your dashboard, it will only distract, confuse and misguide your users.