3 Tips for Better Dashboard Design
Best practices for creating effective dashboard UI
Dashboards are a piece of UI that integrates information from multiple components into a unified display, by which a user can glean key information at a glance.
Designed correctly, they can distill large amounts of complex information into something with simplicity and clarity, thus making them a great tool for business or any organization that seeks to communicate data from a variety of sources.
Here are 3 tips to make more effective dashboards:
1. Organization
Dashboard content must be organized in a way that reflects the nature of the information and that supports efficient and meaningful monitoring.
Information cannot be placed just anywhere on the dashboard, nor can sections of the display be sized simply to fit the available space. Items that relate to one another should usually be positioned close to one another.
— Stephen Few, author of Information Dashboard Design
Organization of information should be guided by hierarchy of what information is most important to the user. Key information should stand out and be understood clearly and quickly.
By looking to web design practices, one can glean useful guidance about layouts through grid based designs.
When starting to lay out your dashboard, consider the following:
Where should you place the most important information? How about the secondary supporting information? How do you lay out charts and text to enable consistency and clarity? How can white space help your audience absorb information and tells a clear story?
2. Appropriate Visualizations
There is a magic in graphs. The profile of a curve reveals in a flash a whole situation — the life history of an epidemic, a panic, or an era of prosperity. The curve informs the mind, awakens the imagination, convinces.
―Henry D. Hubbard
Visualizations are a crucial part of dashboard design. Raw data is often complex, hard to digest and tedious to read over. The purpose of visualizations is to reveal relevant information in a short amount of time, while allowing the user to gain more details if they wish to do so.
Visualizations should serve a specific purpose and convey specific high level information in a more effective way than the basic raw data format.
Consider which type of information you are trying to relay as well as your audience for the dashboard.
Choose an appropriate visualization that supports the questions below:
What information do they care about the most?
What are other important details they need in addition to that?
What is the type of information you are trying to convey?
3. Reduce complexity
The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures.
―Ben Shneiderman
Be selective with how much data you display or the visual methods for which you highlight information. Use of color should be subtle and purposeful as to reduce visual clutter or complexity.
Dashboards ought to convey high level data that can be gleaned toward an actionable outcome. Reduce complexity by using navigational elements such as menus or filters to simplify complex data sets.
