Last month on The Dashboard Spy, we looked at how the winner of a business intelligence dashboard design contest won using sparklines on the dashboard to show a maximum sense of trends in a very small space. Previous to that we looked at another entry using SAS/GRAPH for its dashboard.

Well, it’s time to revisit the contest again. Thanks to Stephen Few’s excellent article on the contest entries and winner, we get to see some of the other executive dashboards.

For those unfamiliar with the contest, the challenge was issued to create a compelling airline executive dashboard from an excel worksheet. Basically, the idea was to create an executive scorecard. Mr. Few’s article (download it in pdf form from the above link) describes the contest scenario as well as tells us how he judged the results. Stephen Few, business dashboard guru and visualization expert, is the author of that great dashboarding book, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.

Here are some of the entries in the dashboard contest. I am just showing the graphics. Please read Stephen’s article for in-depth analysis and judgement of each executive dashboard.

Here’s one of the BI dashboard entries:

This next one goes with the approach of bigger charts:

A little color and a panel approach to dividing the scorecard into zones by KPI category:

This is the SAS/Graph one by Robert Allison discussed previously on The Dashboard Spy.

I rather like this dashboard entry:

And, finally, we get to the winning enterprise dashboard. As previously discussed, the sparklines make for great efficiency.

Be sure to read Stephen Few’s pdf of the contest entries. It’s part of his monthly newsletter. By the way, he announced that he’ll have a new book out next year. Great news!

Homework: If you haven’t read Stephen’s book, please do so. It’s a beautiful book. Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data

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