Essential Dashboard Design UX Principles

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Essential Dashboard Design UX Principles

A Dashboard is a powerful and effective tool that allows end users to gain insight into the KPIs and other integral metrics in just a single glance. As most of you probably know, businesses and designers adopted the term‘dashboard’ from the automobile industry. In fact, a business dashboard is quite similar to an automobile dashboard in many ways. 

For instance, most businesses have a number of changing factors that can have a huge impact on their overall performance. What a business dashboard does is that it simplifies these factors and presents essential information in a simplified and unified way. In the case of cars, dashboards give you a clear idea on how fast you are driving, how much fuel is left in your tank, and many more useful details. 

Just like a car dashboard, business dashboards offer real-time data and results to users to help them improve their business. Dashboards simplify data in the form of easy to understand visuals that will give you a better understanding on what’s working for your business and what’s not. So, in short dashboards helps businesses to make smart and informed decisions that will positively impact your business. 

Do I Need a Dashboard

The truth is that almost every business irrespective of their size can heavily benefit by using a dashboard which aligns with their business objectives. Some large organizations often use multiple dashboards to keep track of KPIs of different departments in their business. If you think that your business should or can do better, it is best to use a dashboard. Keeping track of different KPIs and other business metrics is integral for the success of your business. 

As mentioned earlier, a well-designed and effective dashboard gathers multiple data into a single interface. So, you will be easily able to see a detailed overview of your entire business operations in just a single glance. This will in turn help you to save a significant amount of time that you will need to spend to compile reports. 

Business dashboards offer an unbiased view on not just the performance of the company but also presents insight into each and every department. When you are able to identify what’s working for your business and what’s not, it will surely help you to build a strong online presence for your brand. That said, designing an effective dashboard is not easy. So, we have prepared a list of some essential dashboard design UX principles that will help you design an effective dashboard. 

Build The Right Type of Dashboard

The first thing designers need to do is to decide what type of dashboard is the best choice for your target audience. There are three different types of dashboards : operational dashboard, strategic dashboard, and analytical dashboard.

Operational Dashboards allows managers to easily keep track of the day-to-day stats of different business operations. This will help managers to easily and quickly make actionable short-term decisions to optimize their business performance. One of the fascinating aspects of operational dashboards is that data updates occur very frequently when compared to other types of dashboards.

Strategic dashboards are built specifically for business executives who need a much bigger oversight on their business. Strategic dashboards usually contain detailed summary reports on different business operations. In addition, these types of dashboards also gives end users a clear idea on how their business is currently performing against the KPIs. 

Analytics dashboards are excellent reporting tools that makes it possible for end users to easily and quickly analyse large amounts of business data. When you have access to such vast amounts of data, you will be able to identify new insights and predict outcomes. The data included within Analytics dashboards are updated infrequently or only when necessary. 

Use The Right Layout

It is crucial to ensure that your dashboard is organized in a visually appealing and elegant way. Dashboards that are organized in such a way makes it easier for end users to easily understand what they are looking for. On the other hand, dashboards that are poorly designed or the ones with unorganized data representations will make things confusing and overwhelming for users.

It is best to display the key or crucial information on either the top of the screen or on the upper left-hand corner. End users should be able to see the major trends or key KPIs instantly and quickly. 

Group related pieces

It is best to do a thorough research on your audience and what they need before designing a dashboard. This will help you to easily decide the KPIs and other crucial metrics that you should include on the dashboard. Once you have decided on that, the next thing you need to do is group the relevant metrics within the dashboard. 

Grouping relevant metrics allows end users to easily find the relevant metrics that they are looking for. For instance, you will be able to notice that monthly expenditure and group monthly revenue are always listed together in finance metrics. 

Show Insights and not just data

Some business dashboards contain plenty of data visualizations, but they fail to give a clear idea on what the data really is. You need to understand that context is an important factor when it comes to dashboard design. So, you should provide relevant information to users whenever and wherever possible.

In addition to that, you should also provide useful insight to end users that will allow them to make better business decisions. Allowing users to explore through the data makes it really helpful for them to get a better understanding of what’s working for their business.

Use The Right Data Visualization

As we discussed earlier, the content on your dashboard should be properly organized and presented in a neat way. This is done to ensure that end users will be easily able to access what they are looking for without any worries. So, it is integral for dashboard designers to identify the right type of data visualization tools that are accurate for their dashboard. 

Line, Bar, and Pie charts are commonly used in different types of dashboards. Line charts are clear and compact, and ideal for displaying patterns of change over a specific period of time. Bar charts are the best option when it comes to comparing different items that belong to the same category. Pie charts are also excellent when you want to compare multiple items.  

Conclusion 

Two other factors that play a huge role in the success of your business dashboard are undoubtedly colors and fonts. It is always best to use colors that compliment very well and fonts that make the content in the dashboard easily readable to end users. 

Each and every visual data that you include on your dashboard should serve a purpose and it should be useful to end users. If you are including anything just to improve the visual appeal of your website or for aesthetic reasons, it is best to avoid it. Make sure to ask suggestions from your team and make necessary adjustments to the dashboard whenever necessary. 

 

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