For more Business Intelligence Dashboard Examples, use this link to the Dashboard Spy sitemap: Dashboard

Dashboard

From a simple excel dashboard to a fully integrated enterprise reporting suite, the Business Dashboard is being quickly adopted as the new face of Business Intelligence. It has a rapidly growing role in BI reporting and analysis.

An enterprise dashboard allows at-a-glance visualization of company health and monitoring of key performance indicators. Simple to understand and high in ROI, these executive dashboards are becoming "must-haves" for all enterprises. Easy-to-use by business users and fun-to-implement by the IT department, BI dashboard projects are quickly funded and politically popular.

Dashboards by Example Sponsors

"Dashboards by Example" is a business intelligence blog dedicated to showing you actual examples of do's and don'ts of dashboard design. Study examples of enterprise dashboards, scorecards and other business intelligence interfaces implemented by the world's top organizations.

Looking for a particular dashboard? Try these listings of BI dashboards (call them what you want):

Dashboards Page 1
Dashboards Page 2
Dashboard Page 3
Dashboard Page 4
Dashboard Page 5
Dashboard Page 6
Dashboard Page 7

Search Dashboards

This dashboard screenshot blog is part of the Dashboard Spy network - a unique collection of business intelligence resources. Send us your Dashboards!

Email the Dashboard Spy

RSS Feed

Subscribe to Feed

Navigate

Enterprise Dashboard Advertisements

Enterprise Dashboard Design Taken Too Literally - Enough with the steering wheel metaphor!

I know its just a pet peeve, but I really don’t want to see any more literal uses of steering wheels in enterprise dashboard design. Long time Dashboard Spy readers will remember my previous anti-steering wheel graphic rant about taking this metaphor too far. This screenshot goes even further. Now we get a night-time view of New York City to boot! Take a look at the slogan: “Dashboards for Driving in the New Economy”. This along with the clunky graphics just makes this sales effort too cheesy. I love a good metaphor, but this one’s way overdone.

Update: A Dashboard Spy says I’m being too negative and that I should provide a tasteful design in this vein for him to follow. OK, here is one that implies the metaphor without showing the actual steering wheel: Virginia DOT Dashboard.

Steering Wheel Dashboard Metaphor

Tags: Dashboard Design, Steering Wheel Metaphor, Designs to Avoid

Homework: If you are a programmer or business user who wants to dabble in the design and layout of your dashboard, be warned that the results may look exactly that way. If you want to try, however, you must read The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture, and Type and consult these books on graphic design basics

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s books on enterprise dashboards. His current favorite is Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing executive dashboards.

Was this enterprise dashboard interesting enough to share? Help spread the news about Dashboards By Example. Click on the "Share" icon above to submit this post to your social bookmark service or email the link to a fellow dashboarder or even yourself.

What do you think about this dashboard post? Please leave a comment. Your opinions are valuable to the entire business dashboarding community.

Last Modified: Thursday, August 17th, 2006 @ 22:55

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Want to see a different randomly selected business intelligence dashboard example? Click here to view another Digital Dashboard from the Dashboard Spy.

Dashboard Spy Readers: See these related Business Intelligence Dashboard posts:

Latest posts of interest to the business intelligence dashboarding community - Have you read these recent enterprise dashboard posts?

Recently Posted

Dashboards by Example Volume 1 Goals and Objectives

"Dashboards By Example - BI Dashboard Samples" is the theme and mission statement of this blog. We salute the Dashboard Spy in the field - those business users, project managers, IT executives, application designers, business intelligence experts, analysts, coders and subject matter experts who are on site creating this exciting and new "face of BI". Your business intelligence dashboard can go by many names - performance dashboard, executive dashboard, business dashboard, balanced scorecard, KPI metric summary, enterprise dashboard, bi dashboard, corporate dashboard. Whatever we call it, we believe that the at-a-glance visual approach is the key to user-centric design. Let's learn from each other's dashboard examples and continue to increase the level of usability and usefulness.

We strongly believe that the more dashboards you study, the more adept you will become at choosing correct design solutions for your company. "Learn by Example" is not just a motto - we take it literally, hence the name "Dashboards by Example". So take every chance you get to view examples of BI interfaces. As a matter of fact, take a second now, and study this dashboard example.

What's on your Dashboard?

The Dashboard Spy wants your dashboards!! I've collected over 1000 screenshots of business intelligence dashboards and scorecards for Volume 1 and now need you to send me the next 1000 dashboards for Volume 2. Email me at info at dashboardspy.com and tell me about your dashboard. Send me images, notes, technical details, business rules, metrics, KPIs, anything that you think your fellow Dashboard Spies will have an interest in. Keep this library of dashboarding resources going!

Also, I'd love more links to both the main Dashboard Spy site at http://dashboardspy.com and the Volume 1 blog of 1000 dashboards at http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com. I'd love your help in making these resources better known.

Looking forward to seeing your dashboards, The Dashboard Spy

P.S. Did you check out this free dashboard template for wireframing? Click on the image below for the download link and instructions. Consider it a gift for your unfailing support. Thank you very much. Sincerely, your friend in dashboarding, Dash.

Dashboard

Dashboards by Example Sponsors

Search Dashboards

RSS Feed

Navigate

Enterprise Dashboard Advertisements

Archives

Meta

Categories

Links

Enterprise Dashboard Design Taken Too Literally - Enough with the steering wheel metaphor!

Leave a Reply

Recently Posted

Dashboards by Example Volume 1 Goals and Objectives

What's on your Dashboard?