Dashboard Designing

Recently, I have been assigned with a task of designing Dashboard for a project. It took few days of mine. I could learn a lot related to this. I just want to share my experience.

Many words have become victim to Information Technology for a swift change in their meaning, purpose and reference, usage. One such word is Dashboard. We have heard this referring to the area in front of driver seat in a car or air craft etc. Dashboard is the area that provides an 'at-a-glance view' of the current operational state of the vehicle.

But now, as in usage, the meaning of Dashboard for many is different. For them this is a page that shows "metrics in a single consolidated view," "high-level summaries," and "intuitive indicators ... that are instantly understandable", one that tell us something useful about the essential data required for the user.

One such book defines Dashboard as – “A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.”

Like a Dashboard of vehicle providing all the necessary information that are important for the operation of vehicle. Is the headlight glowing, what is fuel level, what is the battery level, is the turn indictor glowing, now a days there are talking dashboards informing your fuel status and even the status of the doors, whether it is closed properly or not etc. Some vehicles have GPS, or rear view display through camera etc.

However this is not a new concept and we have it in different names from time to time. It can be called as Executive Information System or Business Intelligence or Decision Support System etc.

A typical User’s Requirement:
I want bird’s eye view of the status / progress
I want easily understandable display of data in graphical way
I want conditional color coding for data
I want to see data that will be helpful for taking any decision on seeing the status
I want to find the low level details on drilling down the summary
I want to export the report into preferred file formats like .xls, .pdf etc
I want to customize the Dashboard display for my preference and style
I want to see it in browser as it will help me to access anywhere
I should be able to invoke the dashboard easily and simply.

DO NOTs:
I am NOT concerned on technology used
I do NOT want to see irrelevant details
I do NOT want jazzy graphic display
I do NOT want to navigate more pages

Almost this remains common for all users.

Stephen Few, I will say, an expert in Dashboards, has published many articles on Dashboard. Read some here. Please do not miss this one: Three Blind Men and an Elephant
To see the available Software vendors for dashboard go here

On this whole exercise of designing a Dashboard, I was just amazed with details on Information Visualization, maybe it is another topic for me to explore.