Three Key Commandments of Effective Dashboards
Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2025 4:30 am
A dashboard is a visual snapshot of business performance using KPIs (key performance indicators) to help users make smarter, data-driven decisions. An effective dashboard simplifies the visual representation of complex data and helps stakeholders understand, analyze, and present key insights at a glance. At the core, the objective of a dashboard is to make complex information accessible and easy to digest. But building a good dashboard for the business involves addressing both the design patterns and india whatsapp number data anti-patterns associated with four key building blocks: KPIs, data, formula, and visuals. A pattern is an idea of how to solve a problem. It is simply a known-to-work solution. The anti-pattern is the opposite of a pattern. It is an idea of how not to solve a problem. With this backdrop, this article looks at three key commandments for having effective dashboards.
Building blocks of a dashboard
Commandment 1: Understand the users and their insight needs.
The first key commandment of an effective dashboard is to understand its purpose. Purpose comes from knowing your stakeholders and their objectives. What kind of business questions do they care about? What decisions are at stake? What is the entity needed to measure performance management? In this regard, knowing the interests and drivers of the business users who are consuming the dashboards should be based on the KPIs. In dashboard design, simplicity is the key. Less is more in dashboard design, and the starting point in building an effective dashboard is deciding on the number of KPIs. Research has shown that the number of information pieces that the human mind can hold and process is seven +/- two. In other words, most adults can store and process between five and nine items in their short-term memory [1]. Hence, keep the number of KPIs and the associated visuals on every screen in the dashboard to seven +/- two using a combination of leading and lagging trends.
Building blocks of a dashboard
Commandment 1: Understand the users and their insight needs.
The first key commandment of an effective dashboard is to understand its purpose. Purpose comes from knowing your stakeholders and their objectives. What kind of business questions do they care about? What decisions are at stake? What is the entity needed to measure performance management? In this regard, knowing the interests and drivers of the business users who are consuming the dashboards should be based on the KPIs. In dashboard design, simplicity is the key. Less is more in dashboard design, and the starting point in building an effective dashboard is deciding on the number of KPIs. Research has shown that the number of information pieces that the human mind can hold and process is seven +/- two. In other words, most adults can store and process between five and nine items in their short-term memory [1]. Hence, keep the number of KPIs and the associated visuals on every screen in the dashboard to seven +/- two using a combination of leading and lagging trends.