7 Principles To Design Impactful Business Intelligence Dashboard

The rise of innovative, interactive, data-driven dashboard tools has made creating effective dashboards – like the one featured above – swift, simple, and accessible to today’s forward-thinking businesses. Enter the world of dashboard design and its principles. You have already tackled the largest chunk of the job at this stage – gathering data, cleaning it up, consolidating multiple data sources and building a mix of useful metrics.

Your company dashboard should be user-friendly and a simple help in decision making. In order to help you achieve data-driven progress on your journey, we will discuss 20 dashboard design concepts to ensure that you create the most robust dashboard for your business needs.

How To Design a Business Intelligence Dashboard

With all the information you need to build compelling, results-driven data dashboards on a sustainable basis, these 7 definitive dashboard design principles will help you build stricking and useful dashboards.

Don't try to put all the data on the same page

You're never supposed to build one-size-fits-all dashboards and don't load all the details into one tab. Think of the customers as a community of people with different needs – sales managers don't need to see the same data as marketing experts, HR teams or logistics analytics professionals. If you just want to place all of the data on a single screen, you can use tabs to separate the information by topic or theme, making it easier for users to find information. For example, you can break a marketing dashboard into sections that relate to various parts of the website, such as product pages, blogs, terms of use, etc.

Start with the most relevant KPIs

Selecting the right key performance indicators ( KPIs) to meet your business needs is a must for a truly successful KPI dashboard design. Your KPIs will help shape your dashboard course, as these metrics show visual representations of important insights focused on specific business areas. After you've set your ultimate goals and defined your target audience, you'll be able to pick the best KPIs in your dashboard to use.

Context is important

How would you know whether those numbers are good or bad, or whether they are normal or rare, without having the context? Numbers on a dashboard without reference values are meaningless to the users. And, more importantly, they won't know if any action is needed. A management dashboard template, for example, would concentrate on high-level indicators that are easy to compare, and then provide a visual narrative. Always try to provide maximum detail, even if you see some of it as obvious, your audience may find it perplexing. Name all axes and include names in both maps. Recall having comparative values.

The right layout is key

The Dashboard 's best design practises have more to do than just strong metrics and well thought-out maps. The next move is to put the charts in a dashboard. If your dashboard is visually oriented, users can find the details they need easily. Bad layout forces users to think further until they understand the point, and in a jungle of charts and numbers no one wants to search for the details. The general rule is to show the key details first-at the top of the page, upper left corner. Behind this location there is some scientific insight-most people read their written language from left to right and from top to bottom.

Consistency of labeling and data formatting

Over all, the main purpose of a data dashboard in terms of functionality is to obtain the ability to rapidly extract useful insights. Sure that your labelling and formatting are consistent across KPIs, software, and metrics is important. If your formatting or marking is wildly different for similar metrics or KPIs, it can create uncertainty, slow down your data analysis activities and increase the chances of making mistakes. Designing dashboards that work is key to being 100 percent consistent across the board.

Responsive design

Iphone or tablet optimisation is another important point in the process of designing the dashboard. By providing easy access to your most valuable ideas, you can answer on-the-go crucial business questions, without having to schedule a special office meeting. Benefits such as swift decision-making and instant access ensure everyone has the possibility to look at the data on-the-fly. A mobile dashboard has a smaller screen and therefore can vary in the positioning of the items. In addition , the level of detail compared to the desktop version may not be as comprehensive as this form of dashboard tends to concentrate on the most important, mostly high-level, graphics that suit the device.

Interactive elements

Any good interactive dashboard will allow you to easily dig deep into some patterns, metrics or insights. It is important to understand what makes a good dashboard, to incorporate drill-downs, click-to-filter and time interval widgets into your design. Drill-down is a smart interactive feature that allows the user to dig into more detailed dashboard information relating to a specific aspect, variable or main performance indicator without overcrowding the overall interface.