Dashboard

Exciting Dashboard News from The Dashboard Spy: New Federal IT Portfolio Spending Dashboard Set to Usher in New Level of Business Dashboard Adoption.

Forgive my excitement, but in the course of carefully studying thousands of business intelligence dashboards for the Dashboards By Example blog and various Dashboard Spy publications, I’ve become very confident in my ability to predict which dashboards will truly become “game changers”. Whether because they contain especially compelling data visualizations, are the first ones to “mash up” certain data sources, or come to market with a startlingly new level of user interface design, certain dashboards launch to great acclaim and user acceptance. Some dashboards will achieve a high level of usage and acclaim simply because of the size of the sponsor organization. In this case, when the U.S. government builds and promotes a major dashboard project to publicize the accomplishments of 30 agencies, it is a really big deal.

The new U.S. Federal I.T. Dashboard is now available at http://it.usaspending.gov. Right out of the gate, this business dashboard has ranked on page 1 of the Google search engine and has enjoyed quite a bit of publicity. It is well worth checking out by all business intelligence dashboard designers, users and stakeholders. There is no doubt that this particular dashboard will introduce a great number of new users to the dashboard paradigm.

In the period from June 1, 2009 through June 29, 2009, nearly 400 Federal employees from over 30 agencies tested the I.T. Dashboard. The response within the various agencies was reported to be huge.

Let’s have a look at what all the excitement has been about. First we’ll examine a video about the Federal IT Portfolio Dashboard, then look at some dashboard screenshots.

Here’s the video:

When you visit the IT Dashboard at http://it.usaspending.gov/, make sure to spend a few minutes watching the home page. Note how the charts present themselves. They “flip” through a series of different metrics without user intervention. Almost like watching TV, the viewer can simply preview various KPIs right on the home page’s top graphic.

Here are some screenshots of the IT Dashboard.

For more data views and the lower level pages of this dashboard, please visit the Federal IT Portfolio Dashboard.

Regards

Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy
http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com

Tags: Federal Spending Dashboard, Federal Agency IT Spending, Government Transparency Dashboard

Business Dashboard coverage from The Dashboard Spy: Crisis Dashboard - Coverage of Financial Market KPIs by thedeal.com.

A couple of posts ago, we examined a dashboard meant as a tool for financial intermediaries (see Economic Recovery Dashboard for Financial Advisors). The point I was trying to make in that post was that some dashboards are not meant for the ultimate end user, but as a tool for the middleman looking to add value through expert knowledge and interpretation.

Continuing the “financial markets” domain as an example, we now look at a similar dashboard that provides financial market indicators and interpretation directly to the end user. Dealscape is a section of thedeal.com that provides news coverage and analysis of the financial crisis to its readers. That particular demographic is composed of business-saavy executives looking to stay on top of corporate and financial dealmaking news.

The Dealscape section now has a financial market indicators dashboard titled Crisis Dashboard: LIBOR, VIX, TED Spread, Dow.

As you see from this screen shot, the dashboard is comprised of a section with financial KPIs shown in either red or green, followed by text commentary. I cut off the bottom section of the analysis in my screen grab. Visit the Crisis Dashboard itself to see the full analysis.

An element that I find of interest on this dashboard is the incorporation of the “Share, Email, Discuss, Print” actions that you can take on the line right under the title. It’s a common device on news oriented sites, but an interesting element that business dashboards may benefit from. I would change the icons of course. The yellow/red/green squares can be confused as the typical business dashboard status indicators.

Tags: Financial dashboard, market dashboards, dashboard design, dashboards as tools

Regards

Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy

PS. Have you heard The Dashboard Spy Theme Song?

A reader of the Dashboard Spy newsletter wrote asking about the current state-of-the-art practices on incorporating GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and Geospatial techniques into business dashboards. The reader was concerned about the complexity of doing so because she remembered how clunky (and expensive!) GIS systems were when she last looked into them 20 years ago.

We’ve covered quite a few GIS-driven dashboards on this blog (see bottom of this post for some interesting articles.), but the best way to get a sense of what geographically-oriented dashboards can do is to jump right into a few GIS dashboard examples.

Start with this demo of a map-driven sales portal/dashboard from IDV Solutions using their visualfusion product. Here’s a couple of screenshots to give you a sense of how you can drive data views through manipulating maps. This dashboard uses Microsoft Virtual Earth technology to power the mapping.

Note that the demo uses the time honored Contoso company as an example!

You use the right panel to toggle the view. When you click on “Details”, you get this next screenshot:

And here are some best-practices and commentary about selecting GIS-driven dashboards. It comes from an excellent article on emergency management and the emerging trend of non-expert systems. See Emergency Recovery and Dashboards.

GIS & Dashboards

Not suprisingly, GIS-driven dashboards are becoming more and more common. The folks at ESRI have even begun pitching their ArcGIS Explorer tools as a platform for developing GIS dashboards. I consider this a positive sign for the future of GIS in all types of organizations - for too long what we do in GIS has been difficult to communicate to the outside world, and that has begun to change with things like widely-accessible web mapping tools and decision support dashboards. If we are able to design systems that reduce the time and steps required to communicate what is known from GIS analysis to decision makers then it becomes possible to more efficiently address the emergency situation.

Design criteria for GIS-enabled dashboards include:

• The system must allow analysts to quickly customize the dashboard (for example, when conditions change, data sources are modified, etc…)
• Dashboard tools and graphics must be readily understandable by decision makers who have no GIS training
• Dashboards tools and graphics should focus on strategic objectives and the “big picture”

Snapshot of a hurricane monitoring dashboard developed by IDV Solutions.

SpatialKey is a project by Universal Mind intended to provide geographic visualization dashboards for a wide range of application areas. Their tools are very easy to work with and provide non-expert users with geographic and temporal analysis tools in a web-based setting. The best way to understand how powerful these tools are is to take a spin yourself - I recommend trying one of the crime data examples as they are the most relevant to what might be useful in an emergency management context.

SpatialKey offers very clever web mapping tools designed for non-experts to explore and analyze spatial data.

 
Here are some other Dashboards By Example posts about business dashboards with maps and gis functionality.

http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com/2009/04/17/visual-design-guidelines-for-geographical-data-visualization-dashboards/

http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com/2008/09/16/gmaps-plugin-for-xcelsius-dashboards/

http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com/2008/09/15/best-places-to-work-dashboard/

Tags: Mapping technology for business intelligence dashboards

Dashboard Spy Topic: Business Intelligence Dashboards as Tools for Advisors and Other Intermediaries.

When we think of the target audience for our business dashboards, we typically think of end users within the enterprise. For example, an overall executive dashboard would be viewed by top-level executives, a financial dashboard’s audience would be the CFO and others within finance, and a human resources dashboard would be used by HR staffers during the course of their day.

The ultimate end user comes to mind even more strongly when we consider more personal dashboards such as news dashboards, stock portfolio dashboards, customizable portals, etc.

Keep in mind, however, that there are many types of business intelligence dashboards that are built as interpretive tools for brokers, advisors and similar intermediaries. These dashboard users are not the ultimate end users themselves, but serve as filters of noise, interpreters of data and overall trusted advisors to their clients. Typically, we see dashboards situated as interpretive tools for this level of intermediary in markets that are data-rich, fast-moving and too complicated for fast analysis. These dashboards serve as tools to help advisors dispense advice to their clients. The ultimate goal of such dashboards is to help the advisor come off as smart and knowlegable so as to gain the trust of their clients.

You may ask “Why not just let the end users use the dashboard for themselves?” Usually, the data picture is just too complicated for direct end user comsumption. You need that layer of expert interpretation from the advisors.

In today’s dashboard example, we look at an Economic Recovery Dashboard for financial advisors. This dashboard is set up as a tool for the advisory level role. It provides data for advisors to interpret for their clients, but also attempts to provide a level of institutional knowledge and interpretation of the data. Also, it is laden with many “how to interpret this dashboard” type of help to try to make an instant expert of the advisor.

Open the link provided in the last paragraph to experience the many levels of the dashboard and its approach to educating the advisor. You’ll see that not are the frequently asked questions listed right under the dashboard charts, but that there are many links to explanations of the various KPIs and metrics.

Here’s a screenshot of the economic recovery dashboard:

See the “How do I read this chart?” button? When you click on it, you get this help popup:

Check out the dashboard and you’ll see that for its purposes and intended audience, there is a lot of educational material that it has to deliver. Its an interesting case study for us business dashboard designers.

Also, financial advisors like to view dashboard content away from the screen. Perhaps while travelling to clients. To meet this need, the dashboard designers made sure to provide a pdf version of the economic recovery dashboard. It also serves as a great information-based giveaway to the clients or prospects.

Regards

Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy

PS. Feel free to find me on LinkedIn and connect to me. Click on my name above and add me to your network as a friend. Mention that you’re a Dashboard Spy reader.

Tags: Dashboard Design, Economic Recovery Dashboard, Advisor Dashboard

Today’s Dashboards By Example post examines the influence that video games may be having on data visualizations used on digital dashboards.

Advances in the design of business intelligence dashboards can come from many different places and reflect many different interests. When the Ford Motor Company and one of its design firms, Smart Design, studied the segment of customers really into getting the fuel efficiency game, they discovered that this crowd treated their passion for getting high miles per gallon (MPG) literally as a game! Their “scores”, measured by the miles per gallon calculation, were the source of bragging rights and sense of accomplishment.

Leveraging this discovery into a design element, the team incorporated a “fuel efficiency game” into the prototype dashboard for the new Ford Fusion Hybrids.

Take a look at this screenshot of the concept dashboard and pay extra attention to the right side of the image:

Notice the leaves of the vine to the right of the MPG guage? Here’s how the game works. If you drive the car in a manner that wastes gas, the vine withers and the leaves disappear. If you drive in a fuel efficient way, the vine grows and sprouts more leaves!

Here’s how it was explained by businessweek.com as reported by infosthetics.com (see Ford’s New Prototype Dashboard Concept).

User research discovered how drivers get obsessed with achieving a “high score”, that is the lowest fuel usage. Therefore, fuel efficiency is represented by an “eye-catching rendering of curling vines blooming with green leaves: It’s more than a decorative element; it’s a data-visualization tool intended to change the way people drive. If a driver wastes gas by aggressively accelerating or slamming on the brakes, for example, the vine withers and leaves disappear. More leaves appear if individuals drive more economically.” Even more, this “data visualization” dashboard will be available standard on all new Ford Fusion Hybrids.

Proposing such an abstract, let’s say quite artistic (vine leaves? in a car?), data display is quite surprising. Is this the resurrection of the ambient display concept?

Interesting, no? What do you think of making a “game” out of data visualization? Doesn’t this angle make it more possible to encourage desired behaviours from your dashboard users?

Tags: Dashboard design, ambient dashboards, information visualization

A lot of Dashboard Spy readers have Apple iPhones on their brains these days. With the release of the new iPhone models (3G S) and the price drop of the older 8 gb iPhone to $99, there’s a lot of buzz right now. Personally, I’ve been having an adventure with a “detected but not identified” message when I connect my own iPhone to my Dell laptop but now I’m digressing (see comments below for the work-around that solves it).

Long time Dashboard Spy reader and SAS/GRAPH guru Robert Allison has developed a nifty iPhone dashboard. Take a look at this screenshot:

He was sparked by an image of a dashboard that appeared on this blog, but I’ll let Robert tell the story.

A while back, the “DashboardSpy” posted up a mock-up of a dashboard
for an iPhone.  He got it from BonaVista Systems (it was a graphic they had
used for a contest), and I checked with Andreas Lipphardt of BonaVista Systems
and he says the iPhone dashboard is a “screen mockup”.

http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com/2008/05/05/the-future-of-excel-dashboards/

I decided to try to create the _real_ thing, using SAS/Graph!

How did I create it?

First, I found that the screen dimensions of an iPhone are 320×480 pixels.
Therefore, I set my xpixels and ypixels to those values.

Then, to create the dashboard, I started with a “gplot”, but I only
used it for the haxis and to give me a coordinate system to work with.
I pretty much annotated everything except for the numbers on the haxis.

The names of the “Key Figures” along the left are actually outside of
the gplot axes, and everything to the right of that text is ‘inside’
of the plot axes.  I used a large “offset” value in my haxis to allow
room for me to annotate the red dots, the sparklines, the CV, and
the bar values to the left of the 0% axis value.  I use an angled
title on the left of the graph to guarantee that I have room on that
side to annotate the text for the “Key Figure” names.

For the sparklines, I put 12 variables in my dataset (line1-line12),
and connect them with annotate move/draw.

For the bullet graphs, I annotate a ‘bar’ for each of the 3 shaded
sections behind them, and I annotate a move/draw line segment (with
a wide thickness) for the ‘bar’.

Notice that some of the lines of data have all-missing numerical values.
These are the ones for the section labels, etc.

I tried to write it somewhat generalized, so that you can have a different
number of lines of data, etc.

You can find the full write-up and SAS code for this dashboard here:

Robert Allison’s SAS GRAPH iPhone Dashboard

Here are some images from Robert:

The “mockup” of an iPhone dashboard:

A real iPhone Dashboard created with SAS/GRAPH:

About to zoom in on the iPhone dashboard:

The enlarged view of the SAS iPhone Dashboard:

And here is a view of the rotated dashboard:

As always, Robert Allison has done a great job with the dashboard. Check out his other sample dashboards at Robert Allison’s SAS/Graph Samples.

Tags: iPhone dashboard, sas dashboard

The title of today’s Dashboards By Example post, “Switching Dashboards” has a double meaning. It’s true that many business intelligence users are switching to desktop dashboards because of the benefits of the “immediacy” of data when it’s on your personal desktop. I’ve posted in the past about the use of the desktop dashboard by Allan Wille and his team of dashboarding gurus at Klipfolio, Inc as an “unavoidable dashboard” device (see item #3 in 5 Hot Dashboard Topics of 2009).

The other, more literal, meaning of the phrase switching dashboards arose in a discussion I had with a Dashboard Spy reader over how to design a “switching mechanism” for users to toggle between different dashboards. I’ve personally used the old dropdown selector and the subnav styling (Dashboard 1 | Dashboard 2 | Dashboard 3) as switches between dashboards. The reader wanted a more novel approach and, again, the Klipfolio Dashboard came to mind. Specifically, the Dashboard Demo Assistant that comes with the Klipfolio demo download.

What do I mean? If you’ve tried the latest version of the Klipfolio Dashboard 5.1 software, you’ll know that there are several different dashboards that come with the download. You use the Dashboard Demo Assistant not only to control and configure each of the dashboards, but also to toggle between the dashboards. Download and install the demo to see how it works.

It’s a very cool solution to switching dashboards. I created a Dashboard Spy video of my adventures with the Klipfolio demo.

A reader wrote recently asking why I haven’t produced any Dashboard Spy videos as of late, so here you go. And, yes, of course I included the Dashboard Spy theme song.

Watch for how the Dashboard Demo Assistant is used to load the different dashboards. Also, if you haven’t tried Klipfolio lately, this new version is simply awesome. Make sure to take a look at the new sparkline charting capability. I’ll post more in upcoming posts about Klipfolio. It’s grown into quite a compelling dashboard platform. Meanwhile, enjoy this video:

Regards Hubert Lee, The Dashboard Spy

PS. If you like videos about business intelligence dashboards, be sure to check out dashboards.tv at this link:

Dashboards

Tags: Klipfolio 5.1, Dashboard Design, Klipfolio Dashboard, Klipfolio Demo, sparklines, desktop dashboards, dashboard spy videos, klipfolio dashboards

Dashboard Spy reader and veteran dashboard designer, Aaron Hursman, has an awesome presentation titled Effective Dashboard Design in which he not only presents his approach to designing effective dashboards, but also illustrates best practices with his own dashboard designs.

This is one of my favorite presentations on dashboard design. I’m presenting it because of a Dashboard Spy reader question dealing with the topic of how business dashboard design differs from regular web application design. I thought of Aaron’s presentation because he specifically addresses that topic.

Here is the presentation. Click on this first image to play the video.

As you will see from the above video, Aaron’s presentation starts with the requisite definition of a dashboard. He uses Stephen Few’s definition of a dashboard:

A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives, consolidated and arranged on a screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.

He goes on to explain his dashboard design principles with illustrations of dashboards he has designed such as this Organix dashboard:

He ends his presentation with some of his links to blogs and resouces related to dashboard design . Some of these resources can also be found on the Dashboard Spy’s List of Experts page.

Tags: Dashboard Design, Best practices of business dashboard design, Effective Dashboard Design Presentation, Aaron Hursman