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Airline Executive Dashboard - Sparklines spark this excel dashboard to a data visualization contest win

Dashboard Topic: Sparklines

During an enterprise dashboard design session, we had a heated discussion of the best way to efficiently show data trends. The project members basically fell into 2 camps. One group wanted a simple excel style spreadsheet approach while the others wanted a rich graphic xcelsius type of interactivity. We were at an impasse for quite a while. The resolution? We went with sparklines! Both groups loved it! We remembered the following post:

Tags: Sparkline graphics, dashboards, Enterprise Dashboard Design, Sparklines, Dashboard Design Contest.

Remember when we discussed the dashboard contest with the scenario about the airline management views of enterprise data? (Use the link to see the previously discussed entry by Dr. Allison). The contest was the Business Intelligence Network’s 2006 Data Visualization Competition judged by Stephen Few, data visualization expert and author of the amazing dashboard book, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data. The competition consisted of five scenario descriptions that covered various business situations. Well Andreas of BonaVistaSystems.com, the winner of the airline management dashboard scenario, proudly wrote me from Germany to tell me about his victory. The main visual difference between the winning entry and other submissions was the use of sparklines allowing for efficient screen use. As he explains:

The task was to develop a dashboard for the executives of an U.S. commercial airline. The dashboard has to allow the executive team to monitor their business and to quickly identify anything that needs attention.

The airline dashboard was designed with Microsoft Excel and BonaVista MicroCharts. The dashboard visualizes about 500 numbers on a single screen. The dashboard looks different because it was designed using effective design principles. It avoids ineffective eye-catchers like speedometers or radial gauges. MicroCharts sparklines and bullet graphs are used as an effective means to put all decision relevant information on a single screen.

Here is the winning dashboard:

Airline Executive Dashboard

If you want, you can really zoom in on this enterprise dashboard and examine it in detail. To check out or test drive the product used to create the excel dashboards and sparklines, use these links provided by Andreas:

http://www.bonavistasystems.com/OnlineDemoReports.html

The dashboard won the Business Intelligence Network’s 2006 Data
Visualization Competition:
http://www.bonavistasystems.com/NewsDataVis_Winner.html

It’s an Excel dashboard that uses MicroCharts for dense information
dashboards:
http://www.bonavistasystems.com/Products_SparkLiner_Dashboards.html

Homework: Do your research on sparklines by starting here. Also, you must review the literature by Edward Tufte, the originator of the concept.

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 nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books on business dashboards.

PS: If you find yourself part of an enterprise dashboard effort, you must study Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing enterprise dashboards.

Learn how to create Excel dashboards.Excel Dashboard

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

One Response to “Airline Executive Dashboard - Sparklines spark this excel dashboard to a data visualization contest win”

  1. Los gráficos más pequeños del mundo « CuatroTipos Said on September 14th, 2007 at 4:35 am quote

    [...] de 2006 la empresa BonaVista Systems ganó el concurso anual de la Business Intelligence Network con este “panel de control” destinado a los ejecutivos de una aerolínea norteamericana. Esta pieza gráfica permite a los [...]

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Last Modified: Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 @ 09:01

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 6:31 am 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.

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