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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.

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7 Common Dashboard Chart Types

Dashboard designers don’t just choose pretty colors to decorate the user interface with. I spent quite a bit of time yesterday convincing a potential client of the need to let professional UI designers apply best practices to chart design. Choosing the correct type of graph to accurately portray the business situation at hand is not an easy task.

Business intelligence visualization professionals such as Stephen Few make their living by knowing what type of chart works best in what situation. Beyond the obvious goals of clarity and ease of use, they worry about more subtle things like inadvertently (or worse yet, knowingly) implying meaning to data that really doesn’t exist.

I bring up Stephen Few’s name because of his authorship of a white paper that is now two years old. I forwarded his paper to the client in question in order to educate him about the basic relationships in data that chart designers must be aware of. The name of the ProClarity whitepaper is Effectively Communicating Numbers: Selecting the Best Means and Manner of Display. Read it for yourself and you’ll want to print it out and keep it around for reference.

As an example, did you know that there are “7 Common Relationships in Quantitative Business Data”? I took the liberty of cutting and pasting out for you the examples of the 7 types:

7 types of data charting relationships

As you see, the business data relationship types (and therefore dashboard chart types) are:

Time Series Relationships - Quite a common one. It’s when quantitative values are expressed as a series taken across equal measures of time.

Ranking Relationships - another very common chart. It answers the question of how does one value compare to other values.

Part to Whole Relationships - it’s very useful to see how something is broken down into parts and understand the percentage of each part to the whole. Commonly expressed as a pie chart, but shown in this example as a bar chart.

Deviation Relationships (not what you are thinking ;-)!) - a typical use would be to see how actuals vary against planned figures.

Distribution Relationships - good, at-a-glance way to understand the composition of a set of things. Common shapes are bell-shaped curves and skewed shapes.

Correlation Relationships - pairs of values each measuring a different factor are displayed in order to see if there is a relationship between the factors.

Nominal Comparison Relationships - you’ll need to read the paper for the full explanation of this one, but it’s basically a chart where one axis does not really have a meaning. The sample chart provides a means to compare entities that do not relate to each other in any particular order.

Start by understanding these types of business data relationships, then move on to the rest of this very valuable paper. All dashboard designers are encouraged to study this paper as well as the Stephen Few book, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.

Tags: Dashboard Chart Types, Data Relationships, Dashboard Design, Data Visualization

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One Response to “7 Common Dashboard Chart Types”

links for 2007-10-19 « Schedelbeuk Said on October 19th, 2007 at 10:18 am quote
[...] 7 Common Dashboard Chart Types (tags: dashboard) [...]

Last Modified: Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 @ 12:15

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 12:11 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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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.

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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.