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Bling My Dashboard
Here’s a proposal for a new dashboarding technique that lets your dashboard users control the amount of “eye candy” that they see on thier dashboards and scorecards. How about a “bling” button that you can use to “turn up” the graphic volume of your business dashboards? Imagine being able to toggle back and forth between a minimally styled chart and a more lavish approach to graphing?
The idea comes from SAS dashboarding guru, Robert Allison, who has done some unique work in this area. Take a look at these two versions of his Oil Refinery Production dashboard. Note the “Bling Button” at the top of these dashboards that you use to toggle the amount of eye candy. Robert’s commentary follows the charts.
This is the dashboard eye candy version of the graphs:
If the eye candy is too much for you, just click the “Un-bling My Dashboard” button!
Robert sent in the following as an explanation. Click on the “Read More” link to view the rest of this post.
Hi DashboardSpy,
This is Robert Allison from SAS…
As you know, I’ve got many dashboard examples, but most of them are where I used SAS/Graph to try to “imitate” out competitors’ dashboards.
Well, I’ve finally got something new/unique! …
I’ve added a “bling/un-bling” button to a few of my dashboards
This lets users easily compare the “bling” version of a dashboard (ie, with 3d, gradient shading, bright/garish colors, etc) with a more “dashboard best practices” version (no 3d, no decorative
gradient shading, no use of bright colors except when trying to draw attention to something exceptionally good/bad, etc).My theory is, given the choice, users who need to utilize a dashboard to run a business, look for problems, etc, will switch to the “un-bling” version in the long run. They might be drawn to the fancy/bling version at first, but will quickly get tired of trying to wade through all the visual “fluff” to see the numbers they really need. If you provide both versions, users will have the choice, and then you can look at web logs to see which version they actually end up using.
Here are 2 dashboards I’ve set up this way so far:
http://robslink.com/SAS/democd36/oil_blinged.htm
http://robslink.com/SAS/democd36/airline_blinged.htm
Note that I didn’t “design” the original/bling version - I found them on the web, and then used SAS/Graph to imitate them, and also used SAS/Graph to make my “un-bling” version. I’m not saying these are particularly “excellent” dashboards, but they were the only “bling-ey” ones that I had in my collection to work with
—–
And here are 2 graphs with a similar bling/unbling button (these aren’t dashboards, but just graphs, to show the technique)…
http://robslink.com/SAS/democd36/clinch_blinged.htm
http://robslink.com/SAS/democd36/fbi_blinged.htm
These examples, and the code used to create them, will be on this webpage (usable, but still under construction)…
Here are the screenshots of the other dashboard. The dashboard with bling comes first and the second is what you get when you “unbling” your dashboard.
Tags: Dashboard design, Bling my dashboard, unbling my dashboard, dashboard chart best practices
Dashboard Spy: dashboards
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4 Responses to “Bling My Dashboard”
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Why would you spoil perfectly good dashboards with a “Bling This” button? Honestly, you make it sound like a good feature. The unblinged versions aren’t bad, until they are embellished.
My focus was the “Un-Bling” button, of course!
The “Bling” button was a necessary evil, to allow users to easily compare between the two — hopefully this will make it easier for the “bling oriented” users to see how much better Un-Bling is!
This is fun, and a clever way to show the users how boring the unblinged version is
Sorry for the late reply - been away.
I think this is a fabulous idea.