Can we please stop making crap dashboards, I know I’m guilty of it! I intend to change that, keep reading to find out why I think some dashboards are crap!
Dashboards, reports, infographics, whatever you call them they’re everywhere at the moment. Applications such as PowerBI, Tableau and Qlikview allow users to create visualisations that will show off data in new exciting ways.
This is great, you can show you company’s sales or plot the latest trendy data and get appreciation from your peers. For some cool examples check my previous posts.
We all have to start somewhere, and we’re always learning (I know I am) but some of the dashboards people are designing hurt my brain.
Too Much Data!
You know what this dashboard needs? More data! Why have you plastered every piece of imaginable data to your dashboard. This seems to be a theme across the dashboards I’ve seen recently. Too much information can cause the viewer confusion, imagine the dashboard in your car, keep it limited to key information and make it easy to understand.
Random Visualisations
This appears to be a trend in Tableau, what’s that wavy line across the middle of the page for? It’s confusing and not helping. Why have you created a picture using microscopic data points, that’s cool but is it helping the end user? Keep it simple and stop confusing me.
Find the Key
Nice dashboard, good use of colours, but where’s the key? Sometimes you can get away with not having a key, most of the time you can’t.
Overpowering Images
Background or Foreground images can be great, if used properly they can help the dashboard. If the image is dominating the dashboard it will take the focus off the data, and nobody wants that. If the charts / data become washed out try adding semi transparent backgrounds to your data, this will make the charts look cleaner and emphasise the data.Â
Huge Dashboards
Sort of covered in the first point, if there’s so much data on your dashboard that it requires GPS, please reduce the amount of data or split it into easier to digest dashboards.
Not Citing Data Sources
Do we really need to discuss this? If this is corporate data I could sort of understand the lack of a Data Source, but when using publicly available data please cite the source. (Guilty of this)
So Many Colours
If you have lots of charts across your dashboard, try and keep the colours in the same ballpark. There are lots of sources on the internet that will help you find good colour combinations here. Matching corporate colours is usually a good idea, but please try and keep it classy.
Boring Dashboards
Please try to keep it exciting, nobody is going to pay attention to the white and blue dashboard you’ve created. Make sure elements are inline, and have some flow, lots of white space is going to scare off the user.
Scrolling Tables
Again sort of covered in the first section, if I have to scroll through the tables on the dashboard to see the data it’s usually because there’s too much data. Most users won’t have time or access to scroll, make it simple and easy to read.
Anything I’ve missed?