Flynet are soon to launch a Dashboard Portal where the dashboard is built for you! Small and medium enterprises can very simply choose their preferred KPI’s, enter their data, choose how they wish to see each KPI and are then presented with a fully functional dashboard. key to this offering is the ability to focus on those variables/ KPI’s most vital to their business. Once live it would be great if some of the “dashboard gurus” on here could offer their opinion.

The small business will generally just buy this off the shelf - they generally don’t have the resources (especially time) to do anything else, which means that they will be no more or less good than the “ideology” of the vendor that comes up with the best small business pricing structure!

I say that these dashboards are fine for what they are.

Mr. Tom has the key in that the audience is the small business owner that really doesn’t know (or care) about the fine points of data visualization. They just want a visual depiction of his or her KPIs and metrics.

Take a look at the dials. They have text on them indicating what “good” values should be. This tells you that the dashboard users are at a certain level of sophistication.

For those people, dashboards like these work fine - the best practices of information visualization take a back seat to the fact that they at least have a dashboard panel up.

Yes, Mr. Peltier is correct in that there are many mistakes, but I say that we should applaud the fact that dashboards are being used by the small business community.

The dashboards will evolve. The first step (and largest/hardest to take) is to come up with a first generation dashboard. Once up, these dashboards can be “made right” by learning about and applying information visualization best practices.

I say “hooray” for these dashboard users!

DataViz

How to (don´t!!!!) make dashboards

Likely a small business won’t know or care about the finer points of dashboarding. They’ll rightly think they’ve got better things to do with their time.

What is needed is a very quick “give us your feeds and pick your visualisations” type of product priced to attract the small business, which means really that it needs to be a part of software they use for other reasons.

We’re some way away from that at present, but the big vendors are gradually adjusting their pricing models to attract this market segment. It’s only a matter of time.

Whether they will get good dashboards at that point is still anybody’s guess - even if a company only builds good visualisations, the next company won’t, and who will the customer go for? - The one who can do what they want or the one who can’t.

Again, nobody is going to take the time to educate these guys becuase frankly the typical small business won’t spend enough on this sort of thing to give any decent ROI on a bespoke service.

Maybe they could contract in some sort of BI professional to do some of this, but again I think they will see it as an unnecessary expense.

And yes, they can use excel, but that’s irrelevant - you can make horrid graphs with excel just as easily as with any other package.

Sorry - in retrospect this seems a little pessimistic.

Pie charts are bad enough, 3D pie charts are significantly worse, and they “improved” on them by making the wedges translucent and applying overlapping labels connected to their wedges using entangled leader lines. Use a horizontal bar chart, so the labels along the category axis can be easily read.

Dollar values are shown in several formats, ranging from zero decimal digits to three (i.e., in tenths of a penny!).

The column charts are so wide that they severely limit what could be displayed, and there is no reason that the date labels along the bottom should not be displayed horizontally for easy reading.

As ever, the dials show a single value in a huge space. You could show two or more timelines, showing trends leading up to the current value, in the space of each dial.

These complaints are aired again and again, yet such dashboards are spreading like weeds. I guess to the uninitiated they look very pretty, but they don’t convey much information at all.