Dashboard

    Dashboards By Example Volume 1   From Excel Dashboards to Real-Time Dashboards, these dashboards contain KPIs, metrics, charts, trends and data visualizations. Learn the best practices of enterprise dashboard design by studying the work of your peers on business dashboard implementation teams around the world. Examine their digital dashboards and share your dashboard design tips in return.

For more Business Intelligence Dashboard Examples, use this link to the Dashboard Spy sitemap: Dashboard

Note: Dashboards By Example readers can get these interesting business intelligence dashboard white papers discussing the latest approaches to enterprise dashboards.

Want to connect with the Dashboard Spy? Visit the About The Dashboard Spy page to learn how to connect via LinkedIn.
« Taking Data Chart Minimalism Too Far
Recovery Act Data Dashboard from MicroStrategy »

Visual Design Guidelines for Geographical Data Visualization Dashboards

We business intelligence dashboarders have been taken advantage of the relative ease of incorporating maps and geographic location information into our business dashboards more than ever. Remember how expensive geographic information systems used to be and how arcane a science it was? Well, now there are plenty of free APIs that you can incorporate into your mashup dashboards.

However, Stephen Few reminds us in his latest newsletter Introduction to Geographical Data Visualization that we must follow certain visual design guidelines or risk creating confusing “stories” when incorporating maps into our information visualizations.

The opportunity that many of us now have to display quantitative information on maps offers great potential, but only if we know and follow a few simple visual design guidelines. This article will help you design displays that clearly feature quantitative data in the context of geography, and will suggest ways to extend your analytical reach by coordinating the use of maps and graphs together in complementary and seamless ways.

Here’s a sample chart he provides as a sample of something that just doesn’t work. You can’t just slap what you are doing on your current data visualizations onto a map. Note how difficult it is to compare bars from different charts (unless they are close to each other).

geographic data visualization

Here’s an example of a dashboard done right in terms of bringing in a geographic location data visualization to fully flesh out the story being told. This dashboard shows house price trends:

house sales dashboard

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 “Visual Design Guidelines for Geographical Data Visualization Dashboards”

  1. Bob88 Said on October 23rd, 2009 at 4:20 am quote

    State Geologist of ArizonaGreat post in red! ,

Leave a Reply




Last Modified: Friday, April 17th, 2009 @ 19:34

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 7:34 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.

Want to see a different randomly selected business intelligence dashboard example? Click here to view another Digital Dashboard from the Dashboard Spy.

Dashboard Spy Readers: See these related Business Intelligence Dashboard posts:

Latest posts of interest to the business intelligence dashboarding community - Have you read these recent enterprise dashboard posts?