Business Intelligence Dashboards are supposed to be inituitive, at-a-glance solutions. The best dashboard design solutions take away end-user confusion and questions. But does that mean you don’t need user manuals, guides and end-user training?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. Unless you have a simple, 1-page, read-only type of dashboard, you will need to document things for your users. Particularly if you have transactional capabilities in the software. Even you if your dashboard is very simple, you’ll probably want to document the meanings of the various data elements in your charts and tables.

Of course, the best approach is to build in an easy-to-use help system right into your dashboard screens. We’ve looked at the do’s and don’ts of dashboard help pages.

Today, we look at end user help documents. Typically we spend lots of time with requirements documents and project artifacts, but unfortunately we seem to run out of steam when it comes time to produce really helpful end-user documentation.

I want to share with you an impressive example of a business dashboard document for end users. This is a user manual by Adobe entitled “Using Business Activity Monitoring ES Dashboard“. Use the link in the previous sentence to download the full manual.

It is really excellent and exhaustive. I think you’ll agree with me that it’s a good model to follow (if your team has the energy left to put something like that together!).

Here’s a screenshot from the dashboard manual:

Tags: Dashboard User Manual Template, Dashboard User Guide, Business Intelligence Software User Manual, Documentation