Effective Dashboard Design Presentation
Dashboard Spy reader and veteran dashboard designer, Aaron Hursman, has an awesome presentation titled Effective Dashboard Design in which he not only presents his approach to designing effective dashboards, but also illustrates best practices with his own dashboard designs.
This is one of my favorite presentations on dashboard design. I’m presenting it because of a Dashboard Spy reader question dealing with the topic of how business dashboard design differs from regular web application design. I thought of Aaron’s presentation because he specifically addresses that topic.
Here is the presentation. Click on this first image to play the video.
As you will see from the above video, Aaron’s presentation starts with the requisite definition of a dashboard. He uses Stephen Few’s definition of a dashboard:
A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives, consolidated and arranged on a screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.
He goes on to explain his dashboard design principles with illustrations of dashboards he has designed such as this Organix dashboard:
He ends his presentation with some of his links to blogs and resouces related to dashboard design . Some of these resources can also be found on the Dashboard Spy’s List of Experts page.
Tags: Dashboard Design, Best practices of business dashboard design, Effective Dashboard Design Presentation, Aaron Hursman
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It’s an interesting presentation, but not quite accurate …
The dashboard he shows on slide #41, which he says is from Stephen Few’s book is actually a “re-interpretation” I did (with SAS/Graph), and it has several differences from Stephen’s version.
Stephen’s original version from p. 177 of his book:
http://robslink.com/SAS/democd19/sfew_capture.gif
And here’s my version, and also my “info” page where I describe some of the differences, etc:
http://robslink.com/SAS/democd19/sfew.htm
http://robslink.com/SAS/democd19/sfew_info.htm
Notice that I leave out the sparklines, I put red outlines around the bars that have red dots, my yellow background is brighter, etc, etc. I know that Stephen doesn’t quite agree with all my changes, and therefore he might not like “my” version being shown as if it were the version that he created and included/condoned in his book.
Robert A, thanks for pointing this out. In response, I have posted the correct image from the book. I apologize for giving Stephen Few credit for your work.
Aaron – no problem … it was actually kinda flattering to have my work confused with that of the “King of Dashboard Design” (Stephen Few)! Thanks for making the correction!