In 2007, news footage appeared on YouTube of rats scurrying through a Taco Bell-KFC restaurant in New York and the stock value of parent company Yum Brands dropped 1% on that news alone. Sales for the quarter fell by 11%. In the space of a day, a multinational corporation was damaged because of one blundering franchise owner. That was how fast business moved four years ago. Things are even faster today.

If you don\’t wrap your head around this dizzying pace, you\’re likely to get left in the dust. The good news is that the tools are out there to apprehend your situation in the most frenetic of environments. But if you\’re simply trying to stay on top of an ever-growing pile of data, you need a way to keep it manageable, a way to comprehend it at a glance.

Enter the data dashboard.

A dashboard is a one-stop shop for important, high-level information without the details. It puts all the data you need to make informed decisions onto a single screen. It can be a general organizational overview, for instance, giving you a snapshot of your whole business. It can also be an overview of any facet of an organization that you\’re monitoring. If you\’re a product manager for Mustang at Ford, you may want only data pertaining to the Mustang. It need not be business related at all. If you\’re an epidemiologist, your dashboard may contain statistics on disease rates, cities or regions with outbreaks, and availability of treatment.

Because there are a lot of misconceptions as to how dashboards work, or should work, this article will explain how to create an effective and useful dashboard, and how to avoid the most common mistakes.

Best practices for dashboard design

The first step to making a good dashboard is ensuring that everything is available at a glance.

A dashboard is not synonymous with a portal. Ability to link to data is no substitute for a good one-stop shop. Remember, you\’re looking at the big picture and not worrying about drilling down into the details. Everything should be there on one page.

Skip the speedometers. We told you before that silly, oversized graphics that are made to look like steam pressure gauges just waste space and are hard to compare against one another. They may be fun to make, but they aren\’t doing much for you.

Separate everything into relevant, well defined areas. Stephen Few had a competition to design the best dashboard for a given set of information. Even the winning design was not immune to his reproach, however, because it did not clearly separate the data into meaningful areas on the page. A good dashboard leads your eye to the set of data you\’re looking for right away and cordons off the less-relevant stuff. Oh, and don\’t waste valuable real-estate on information that you can\’t act on, as important as you may think it is. You\’ll just get frustrated.

Don\’t make a mess. If you have a lot of categories to keep track of, you may want to only include or at least feature the biggest players. Generally speaking, a line graph can sustain up to six different lines before it becomes hard to read. You can usually get away with subsuming anything beyond the top six categories into an \”other\” line or bar (the bar may contain further information with stacked bars).

Use precise numbers sparingly, and keep them in tables. If you have to squint and strain to get an exact figure from a graph, you\’re doing it wrong. If you put precise numbers on your graphs, you\’re making a mess. Put key values into tables and save the rest for deeper analysis.

The second step is to give context and meaning so you can take action.

Have something to compare your data to. Your data does not exist in a vacuum, and if it did, it would be worthless. Show actual measures against predicted and targeted ones. Are sales below your expectations? Is inflation outpacing wages? These are things you want to know.

Show trends leading to the present. Is your company\’s revenue growing or shrinking? Before you worry about categorizing present data, you need to know what events have led up to the current situation.

Finally, for a dashboard to be useful, you must use fresh, real-time data.

Canned reports based on stale data are passe. Every time you take a look at your dashboard, you should be seeing up-to-the-minute information. Make sure your reporting software can pull directly from the database.

Dashboards are tactical, not strategic. When displaying trends over time, only go as far back as you need to apprehend situations you can control in the here and now. Remember those pesky rats? Your dashboard should be able to focus in on the fast-acting PR effects of renegade rodents.

Do you have a dashboard set up to keep you on top of things? If so, does it follow these best practices? I encourage you to create or refine your own dashboards, and send us your examples. There\’s a ton of information out there and only so many hours in the day. Make sure you\’re getting the most out of it.

To learn more about dashboards in the context of web-based self service reporting or ad hoc reporting, please visit the ActiveReports Server web site at activereportsserver.com.

To learn more about dashboards in the context of web-based self service reporting or ad hoc reporting, please visit the ActiveReports Server web site at http://activereportsserver.com.

Author Bio: To learn more about dashboards in the context of web-based self service reporting or ad hoc reporting, please visit the ActiveReports Server web site at activereportsserver.com.

Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: charts, reports, self-service reports, ad hoc reports, activereports server, activereports