1. Introduction
This paper defines what a digital dashboard is and is designed to help you
identify the key elements which make a digital dashboard useful. Having over three
years' experience in building and designing digital dashboards for multiple needs
and end users, Dundas Software is in the unique position of consolidating our
experience into information that will help you build a visually appealing and
well designed digital dashboard.
A digital dashboard is a collection of data visualization tools that provide
the means to quickly get an overview of how an organization or a section of an
organization is performing and the reasons behind its performance. A digital
dashboard achieves this by allowing a user to monitor important business
activities and processes that give insight into a company’s activities. One
example of a tool used by dashboards is KPIs. KPIs, discussed more in section
3.3, give the user a very accurate idea of how a unit is performing without the
user having to do deep analysis. KPIs are a fast and efficient way to deliver
information, and are an integral part of a digital dashboard. In
addition to providing quick analysis tools such as KPIs, dashboards allow the
user to analyze the root causes of performance from many different perspectives.
Once the root causes of performance are known, it is much easier for that
organization or individual to act accordingly. In short, a digital dashboard is
a tool that allows a user to quickly monitor and analyze an organization,
division, group or individual’s performance.
Digital Dashboards are used in all industries including Manufacturing,
Financial, Healthcare, Retail, Education and Energy. Each industry uses
dashboards in different ways, but the overall purpose of a dashboard stays the
same.
Figure 1: Financial Dashboard
Figure 2: Help Desk Dashboard
As you can see in Figures 1 and 2 above, the help desk dashboard looks very
different from the financial dashboard; what may be useful for one industry may
not be at all useful in another. That said every industry has some
metrics that can benefit from a dashboard format and that can potentially make a
company more efficient.
2. Why use a dashboard?
The goal of a digital dashboard is to provide actionable information based on
past data which predicts future performance, allowing for effective
decision-making. There are certainly other avenues of data analysis aside from
dashboards which have the same goal, but the advantage of a dashboard is that it
is easy to use, provides timely data and, most importantly, gives an idea as to
how to go about implementing potential improvements and solutions.
Figure 3: Dashboard represented in Excel
In Figure 3 above, a typical dashboard created in Microsoft Excel is
displayed. While this dashboard has most of the desired information
displayed, it is not in a useful form. Figure 4 below is the same data
represented in a .NET digital dashboard.
Figure 4: Dashboard represented in a .NET application
The dashboard in Figure 4 is more useful than the dashboard in Figure 3
because it displays information in an easier to absorb format. Furthermore, all
information relating to sales and revenue is also readily available within the
same application.
Consider the following scenario: Over the past several months a company has
been engaged in strong marketing campaigns, and as such, revenue has increased.
The supplied chart of this situation looks akin to Figure 5 below:
Figure 5: Simple chart of Revenue vs. Marketing
While this chart quickly identifies that the sales are doing well with
increased marketing expenditures, it does not identify why. Where is the
marketing money going, and what specifically has been increasing sales? The
answer to these questions are not clear from this one chart, so more information
is needed. Of course, there are means of finding this information and deciding
what the best way to display it is, but a dashboard provides this data in an
easy to read form with all relative information consolidated in one place. The
decision of what is important has already been thought of, so you just need to
look at the visualizations.
Figure 6: Example dashboard of Marketing Campaign
In Figure 6, after only a few moments of observation, it is obvious that web
banners have obtained the highest marketing funding, and that nearly 30% of all
visits to the companies’ webpage come from banner advisements. Furthermore,
while ABC Coders has the highest hit rate, The Code House has the highest
click-through rate. This information has been presented in multiple forms which
best represent the data. These assortments of visualizations provide the
advantage of clarity, something not easily achievable with other avenues of data
analysis. Figure 6 both answers the questions raised by Figure 5 and provides a
clear picture of the marketing campaign.
The ability of a dashboard to display different data in multiple forms is one
of the main benefits of using a digital dashboard. The components used when
creating a digital dashboard include charts, gauges, maps, diagrams, tables and
scorecards. While the question of which tool to use for what type of data should
be considered when developing a dashboard, digital dashboards provide the
advantage of being able to dynamically change the data visualization on request
so that data can be viewed from multiple perspectives.
A digital dashboard also has the advantage of having all different types of
related data consolidated into one place. For example, in Figure 6 it would be
very simple to add drill-down functionality to allow the user to click on a
point within a chart and find out more information about the selected item. This
kind of in-depth data analysis greatly assists the user in finding causes of
performance anomalies. Adding this functionality to a dashboard is both
easy to implement by the developer, and easy to use for the end user.
3. Best Practices
Best Practices are the guidelines for building digital dashboards that we
believe result in a useful dashboard. While you can design a digital dashboard
however you wish, the following practices result in a much more useful,
efficient, and aesthetically pleasing dashboard. These practices are also
extremely useful when starting the design process of a dashboard project.
3.1 Target User
The first and most important practice of building a dashboard is identifying
who your target user is. A dashboard aimed at an executive of a company and one
aimed at the marketing director are going to be very different. During the
entire development process the end user should be kept in mind and the
application tailored to this user. The tailoring process may include simple
things such as placement of controls or data sources, but it can also include
more complicated things such as the flow of the entire dashboard, or viewing
secure data through a secure connection.
3.2 Right tool for the right job
A difficult requirement of building a digital dashboard is to decide what
type of data visualization to use for different kinds of data. Generally, data
should be displayed as follows:
- Geographical data (i.e. Sales by Province in Canada) – Map
- Data over time, ratio data, comparison of linear data – Chart
- Snapshot data, single values (i.e. KPIs) – Gauge
- Multidimensional data - OLAP
- Other data – Diagram
Using this list should make it easy to break down any data into a group and
display it with the appropriate data visualization tool. Further to this, making a
dashboard dynamic so that the user is free to change the data visualization on
demand is also a good practice, as there may be a perspective the user wishes to
view that cannot be predicted while developing. Often times there are ways to
get dynamic controls without having to code yourself, an example being
Dundas
Chart for OLAP Services which has a lot of end-user manipulation controls
already built-in to the control.
3.3 Correctly Identifying KPIs
A KPI, or Key Performance Indicator, is a quantifiable measurement that
reflects the factors which contribute to success within a company. Usually
different people within the company or third party consultants agree upon these
measurements beforehand, but sometimes these are defined by the dashboard developer. It is imperative that KPIs be chosen correctly,
if they are not it can amount to incorrect data leading to bad decisions.
Research and time should be devoted to learning the organization or group’s
important indicators of success as this could make or break a dashboard.
3.4 Context
Context is an item which in most dashboards is completely forgotten. This is
baffling, as without context, KPIs are completely useless. Consider the
following two items of data:
Figure 7: Example data with no context
After a quick glance at Figure 7, the following assumptions are made: Nick is
doing really well in sales and everyone else is not, and the revenue per sale is
pretty high. This, however, may not be the case.
Figure 8: Same data as Figure 7 with context
Figure 8 shows the same data with context. In this case, it is clear from the
chart that no employee has hit the sales target this month. As well, it can now
be observed from the gauge that the revenue per sale is not within the expected
range. Ideally the gauge should be further improved by an explanation as to what
the range and marker are, but at the very least marking the gauge gives it
sufficient context.
While giving context to data may seem like an obvious step, it is the most
omitted practice by developers of dashboards. In most cases, context is left out
because the person creating the dashboard has been working with the data so much
they know what “good” and “bad” data is. This assumption, however, cannot be
applied to the end user as they may draw false conclusions.
3.5 Layout and Clarity
Layout encompasses the design and placement of controls within a dashboard.
While this aspect may seem unimportant, the layout can have a huge impact on
whether or not users can easily use a dashboard. The layout should be in a
logical and fluent order with respect to the specific data that the dashboard is
showing. The dashboard should also conform to the 3 and 10 second rules; within
3 seconds the user should have an idea as to the overall performance of the
subject, and within 10 seconds the user should have a general idea as to why
this performance is being achieved. For example, if a user were to look at a
well designed marketing dashboard, within 3 seconds they should know what
marketing campaigns the company is currently engaged in and how each is doing,
and within 10 seconds know which campaigns are doing best and perhaps have some
idea as to why. If the dashboard is too unintuitive to conform to the 3 and 10
second rules then it will not be useful.
3.6 Visual Aesthetics
Visual aesthetics include animation, palettes, 2D and 3D effects, and the
general look and feel of the actual controls. This is closely related to the
layout of a dashboard but is concerned with the aesthetic appeal of specific
items within a dashboard rather than the overall design. While visual aesthetics
are important in making a dashboard attractive, developers must be careful that
the visuals do not interfere with the usability and efficiency of the digital
dashboard.
3.7 Customizability
While great care should be taken in deciding what data is important for the
user of a dashboard to see, providing some ability to customize the view is a
good practice to follow. This point is especially true in OLAP driven digital
dashboards where the data is multidimensional and the only way to formulate a
coherent picture of the data is to view it from all angles. As well, giving the
user the ability to change their perspective of the data often allows them to
see trends or important changes within it that the user may not have been able
to see otherwise. Reporting Services is an excellent example of a tool that is
devoted to giving the user the ability to modify the underlying data query with
little effort, and as such has enjoyed great success in the enterprise market.
4. Build a Dashboard
Before starting on a dashboard there are a few steps that should be
considered. First, the platform that is used for the dashboard can have a severe
impact on the available functionality. For example, Reporting Services was
mentioned above for its ease of end-user customizability with respect to data.
While this is true, Reporting Services has limitations when it comes to
interaction with controls – something that the .NET platform does not. Thus, if
it is of extreme importance that the user can highlight, zoom or select points
on a Chart then Reporting Services would not be the right platform to choose.
Making this decision before beginning implementation can save a lot of time,
effort and headaches that can occur later in the development cycle.
In the same tone as platform choice, data storage choice is also a factor
that should be considered before beginning implementation of a dashboard.
Sometimes organizations will already be using a format for their data storage
and may not be willing to have copies or move the data around. However, if this
is not the case then choosing, for example, a standard SQL database or an OLAP
database will result in very different data structures designed for very
different data sets. Careful consideration should be taken when choosing a data
storage format to find one that best fits the data.
When the above decisions have been made and implementation has begun, the
last thing to do is to follow the best practices. This point may seem a bit
redundant, especially given the topic of this paper, but ignoring any of the
practices can have a serious detrimental effect to a dashboard project. If you
are unsure of how to proceed when creating your dashboard, or do not have the
resources to create one, Dundas Software offers our years of dashboard
experience as an available consulting resource should you require it. Our
consulting services can greatly speed up the development of a dashboard project
as well as clarify any of the practices outlined above, resulting in an
efficient and useful digital dashboard.
5. Conclusion
At the beginning of this document it was stated that a digital dashboard is a
tool that allows a user to quickly monitor and analyze the performance of an
organization or group. To this end, the best practices (Target User, Correctly
Identifying KPIs, Context, Layout and Clarity, etc) have been formulated and
written. Each practice has been carefully devised and clarified over the years
to ensure that a dashboard following the practices will result in far more
clarity than a dashboard that does not follow the practices. Readers of the best
practices often think them to be obvious, but a quick look around at the numerous
dashboards available on the internet shows that very few follow any significant
number of the outlined practices, and almost none follow all of them.
The products offered by Dundas Software are all used for data visualization
and fall naturally within the realm of digital dashboards. The .NET products,
Dundas Chart,
Dundas Gauge and
Dundas Map are all designed to be flexible and
end-user friendly, as well as easy to data-bind in order to make building a
dashboard easy for a developer. Dundas Software also offers the same products
for Reporting Services, and in addition,
Dundas Calendar, as well as currently
investing in Share Point and Windows Presentation Foundation for future
products. With the wide array of platform support and data visualization tools
available from Dundas Software, any dashboard can be built quickly and easily
using a product that fits the requirements of the user. These products, combined
with the best practices outlined in this document result in an efficient and
useful dashboard every time.
Copyright 2008 - Dashboard Insight - All rights reserved.