Week 5 & 6 Information Dashboard Design

In this two week's lecture Ms Chong has gone though Dashboard design in detail. I think the two lectures are helpful in doing our project as it provide us with guidelines to effective Dashboard design.

Dashboards are visual display that fits on a single computer screen and display information needed to achieve specific objectives.

There are three different types of Dashboard.

Dashboards for strategic Purpose

This type of dashboard is usually for the top management where real time data is not required.

I like to recommend this article to my friends. Totally agree to the article and find it very detail and contain a lot of information and facts

Dashboard for Analytical Purpose

The type of dashboard should allow drill down and has a more sophisticated display media when compare with Dashboards for strategic Purpose.

Dashboard for operational purposes

Real time information is presented, able to alert user on abnormalies

Visualization is a very powerful way of presenting solutions and findings. Dashboard is one of the popular tool but creating an effective dashboard is not easy. people have short-term memory. Dashboard should not contain too much information as user may not remember if the information is overwhelmed. 3 to 9 chunks of visual at a time and fit everything into one screen.

Having an effective dashboard allow the user to focus on important data and alert user when necessary.

I have summarized the key points for creating an effective dashboard from the two lectures.

• Using appropriate color, emphasis colors for attention grabbing.
• Pay attention on the 6 principles of visual perception.
• Only include absolute needed information(It is a dashboard not a detail report!)
• Condense carefully so that the meaning don't decrease.
• Use visual display mechanisms that can be easily understood.
• Reduce non-data pixels and enhance data pixels

Personally I found this example in lecture week 5 very interesting. It demonstrate the importance of good dashboard design.

As you can see by using the appropriate color it make the job of user much easier. In one glance the user is able to get the needed information which is the number of Fives.

Some tips above for effective dashboard creation is going to be useful when it comes to dashboard design. But I think it is not enough, we must understand the different type of display media. I believe it is very important for us to understand when to use which display media and use them appropriately.

The diagram below demonstrate the importance of choosing the correct display media for different information.

There are two different display media in this graph, one is the table and the other is the line chart. Line chart is a better display media for this case. Patterns and trends is easily spotted. Information is very to understand if we present it in a table format, in fact it is almost unreadable and not useful at all.

Some tips from me for choosing the right display media.

• Try to avoid using thermometer as it does not display the maximum and minimum number.
• Bar and Column graphs is used for comparing and usually involve more than one measure.
• Interval Scale for bar and column chart.
• Stacked bar is good for compare the whole data and see information in a little detail.
• Scatter Plots is good for correlation.

Personally I find this case study about dashboard design very interesting. I think it is useful for our learning.

That's all I like to share for Information Dashboard Design.
Happy learning
Cheers~