Seven Areas to Focus When Designing Dashboards

UX Architecture

Dashboards are an extremely hot topic because they provide relevant insights through distilled data metrics displayed as overviews, trends and a variety of other data visualizations.

Kenneth Lee
June 1st 2017

As data science and computer learning grows, dashboards are becoming more capable of doing predictive analytics such as flagging future threats, identifying future opportunities and even recommending the next course of action. More and more, dashboards will be making intelligent suggestions on how to resolve issues and even proactively prevent them. Alongside these disruptive technical advances taking place, UX professionals are helping craft the experiences that these intelligent dashboards are offering. Here are seven areas to focus when designing a dashboard.

1. Focus on Business Objectives

There is always a balance between users’ wants and needs and business objectives. We first need to determine what outcomes the business wants to drive. Is it to properly replace and maintain parts? Is it to motivate people to come in to the gym? Or maybe the goal is increase customer loyalty by provide a financial service for customers. After determining the business goals, we need to look into how each users' experience will guide them towards intended outcomes. As UX professionals we must ensure that business goals are met while keeping users' needs at the forefront of our project endeavors.

2. Focus on Personalization

It’s tempting to want to start designing-up the latest dazzling data visualization patterns, but none of these design patterns will be useful unless we start understanding the varying needs of the users. Dashboards are usually very personalized. For instance, an oil and gas technician working in the fields may need to see very granular data on his tablet; whereas his manager may need to only see a macro view of his region of oil tanks. Develop some key personas and try understanding their behaviors, motivators, device usage patterns, as well as their pain points in using the current system(s). If it’s enterprise software, try to understand what it’s like doing their job.

3. Focus on Meaningful Insights Not Data

Dashboards have the power to motivate behaviors by presenting them meaningful insights. Seeing a magenta printer cartridge has only 5% ink left can motivate a user to proactively buy ink before it runs out. Learning that your body weight is higher, but your body fat percentage has been gradually coming down can inspire you to stay with the program you are on. Although the dashboard you are designing may have data, a lot of data, remember that mere data is meaningless if it doesn’t provide the right insights. Going back to the oil well technician, one data point may be high, but he may need to see the number in red to know that the oil well has risks of malfunction, especially if he is viewing this on his feet. The challenge is to make information meaningful because it gives important feedback, it influences decision making, or causes one to take action on an issue. Ultimately, a dashboard has the power to give us more control over our job, home, and even lifestyle.

4. Focus on Context and Motivations

Dashboards are created for distinct contexts such as managing your electricity, overseeing technicians, and reviewing your health. Within this context there is also a variance in motivation. For example, a software product may be oriented around a providing sense of urgency to a patient caregiver, but to the executive it may be oriented around providing high-level feedback on the performance of the ICU unit.

5. Focus on Prioritizing

Every pixel of a dashboard should be regarded as highly-coveted real estate; and the top-left section of a dashboard can be regarded as “Boardwalk”. This means you need to be focus a lot of your research to see if every module is likely to deliver value to the end user. Each module has to have points of interest and needs to be given the right precedence. A few years ago, I designed a dashboard homepage for a James Avery employee portal, and during the user testing phase, we found it was best to focus the bulk of our testing time studying what the employee wanted to see first and what was most valuable to various user groups. Also, it's not just about real estate location. A module may be given more precedence because of it's visual dominance through the use of color, fonts weights and sizes, and other visual design techniques.

6. Focus on Simplifying

Dashboards usually have a lot of data to present, and it won’t be long before your interface gets inundated with too much busyness. Here are some points to consider that can help reduce the clutter.

  1. Reduce the number modules.
  2. Avoid charts that are hard to interpret.
  3. Hide modules behind tabs, accordions and/or sliders.
  4. Reduce the number of items on each module (i.e. showing the top 3 selling products instead of the top 10).
  5. Provide an overview chart or graph that allows you to drill down further.
  6. Reduce the unnecessary visual clutter such grid lines, clashing colors, redundant labels. Yes, grid lines may help deciphering accuracy, but the user may be only intested in the trends.
  7. Group like information together.
  8. Use direct labeling when possible. Instead of putting numbers on the y-axis, consider putting them inside the bars of your chart.

7. Focus on Non-Data Modules Also

It’s easy to feel every inch of the screen needs to be covered with charts and numbers, but the goal is to create a dashboard that is useful. Why can’t a dashboard feature compelling content such as videos or quotes? If your goal is to motivate people into fitness, why not consider a smart motivational message based on how the athlete is doing? Have you considered gamifying the experience?