Technology has made the gathering and storage of data easier but much of this data is useless unless it can be displayed in meaningful ways. Dashboards provide an engaging and interactive means of displaying and understanding data. Furthermore, data visualisation helps employees become more conscious of their performance and in turn, improve it.
There are many different ways to display data in dashboards. Here are just a few examples:
These are simple dashboards that show top line numbers with some sort of colour scheme or icons to denote relative performance versus the past, benchmarks or competitors. It’s common to use traffic light symbols and colours to do this although it can be fun to use more creative ways of displaying relative performance – see our weather map example.
These are similar to the above but are further developed so that the user can drill down from the summary data into the detail.
Data often takes on new significance when plotted against a different dimension. Plotting sales data onto a map is a good way to display geographic differences but it’s possible to use other dimensions or even provide information as opposed to data. For example, in a medical context, one could plot data and information onto anatomical diagrams.
When a business has a whole range of data and information regarding a subject, it can be useful to gather all of this together into a single, rich, interactive dashboard. These types of dashboard allow users to navigate and discover the data and its correlations for themselves. For example, a business might want to show a range of information related to a market – such as its sales performance, the economic health of the region (stock indices, GDP etc), a timeline of events such as acquisitions, the dates and details of product launches or campaigns, and even videos. See the BRICs example to the right which is designed to present data and information about a company’s activities in emerging markets.
Sometimes data tells a story. An effective way of showing this is to create an animation that shows the data changing. This can be supplemented with audio narration (and subtitles) and can also be made interactive so that the user can control exactly what he views in the videographic.
A common concern when thinking about dashboards is how to integrate the data. Ideally a dashboard will connect directly into a data warehouse and be able to present live data. However, this is not always possible due to technical restrictions or because the data simply does not exist in a database. In these cases, it’s possible to build dashboards where the data is inputted manually. This is easier than it sounds. We often build dashboards that are fed by a simple text or excel file that can be updated by a non-technical person. The dashboard widget reads the text file and updates the visuals automatically.
This type of dashboard, although requiring manual updating, is often cheaper to develop since it does not have to interact with complex database systems.
We can help you develop any of the dashboard types discussed above.
There are various dashboarding tools available on the web. These can be effective but are sometimes hard to implement or do not provide the data view that you want to show. To get around this, we build custom dashboards for many of our clients for both intranets and websites. Where possible, we re-use existing components to keep costs down and then build on top of these.
The process for creating dashboards is pretty straightforward. We start out with a briefing and then go away and mock up the dashboard on PowerPoint. This allows the client to visualise the dashboard and make quick and easy changes before finalising requirements. Once signed-off, the mock-ups are passed to the designers who create the graphical look and feel of the dashboard. In the final step, our developers build the logic that determines how the dashboard works.
That's it! If you want to learn more, please get in touch and do take a look at the examples on the right.
