Dashboard

Executive Dashboards must above all deliver actionable information. That is, after all, the goal of the executive using the dashboard - “Show me what actions to take to optimize my business”.

The challenge for us executive dashboard designers is how to create a dashboard that meets these goals.

The other day we viewed a video on Avinash Kaushik discussing analytics dashboards. That post had some great information on the do’s and don’ts of dashboard design, but there was much more that I wanted to present but couldn’t due to space contraints. So in this post, we’ll take a further look at some sage dashboarding advice.

Avinash has this page on Create High Impact Actionable Executive Dashboards that we should all read.

Here’s a screenshot of the his amazon page. My screenshot doesn’t show the explanation of the rules themselves, so you’ll have to visit the page.

Here are the five dashboard design rules along with a sentence or two of Avinash’s:

# 1 Churn (and stay relevant)

Contrary to popular belief, dashboards are not carved in stone and hence are not permanent affairs.

# 2 The Power of a Single Page

It might not be the most obvious rule, but if your dashboard does not fit on one page, you have a report, not a dashboard. Additional layers of this rule are as follows:

• Page Size = A4
• Print margin = minimum of 0.75 inch (all sides)
• Font size = minimum of 10 (for metrics), minimum of 12 (for goals/benchmarks)

That should not leave a lot of room for doubt or argument. Single page.

# 3 Don’t Stop at Metrics—Include Insights

Most often dashboards are a collection of numbers and dials and graphs, but they leave it to the awareness and intelligence of the reader to infer what all that data might indicate.

# 4 Isolate Your Critical Few Metrics

My advise is to spend lots of time trying to understand exactly what critical few metrics drive the business.

# 5 Benchmark & Segment

Never report a metric all by itself. Period. There is no metric on a dashboard that should exists without context, because it is the only way to ensure insights jump out rather than questions.

Tags: Dashboard Design, Business Intelligence, Actionable Dashboards, 5 rules of executive dashboard design, High Impact Dashboards

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Last Modified: Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 @ 22:15

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 2:40 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.

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