Good data, great dashboards
Are you seeing the value in your data?
In this series the team at White Box takes a look at visualisation best practice, covering all manner of dashboarding techniques to optimise your reporting tools.
Want to see more tips? Check them out here.
Amongst the typical arsenal of visualisation tool features is the ability to drop imagery in a dashboard. It’s a nice idea, a semi-transparent background of people having a meeting (always with beaming smiles of course) is inspiring, surely? Or a pop-up image every time you click on a different product in a table? How about a photo for your sales reps?
To use an Australian phrase passed down by intellectuals through the ages, “yeah, nah”.
And here’s why:
They get real tired, real quick. Token background imagery is kinda neat on the first demo of a new dashboard, but looks stale on repeated viewing (and repeated viewing of your dashboards is what we’re hoping for). Note if it’s a one-off visual to accompany a report or article then that’s a different matter - it can certainly accentuate in that case.
They get in the way. Outputs move subtly over time and with different filtering, meaning the placement of an image might work for your testing scenario but not for everything that happens in daily use. What happens when your white font value is suddenly lost in that little white bit of the background that you’d never noticed before?
They’re tricky to source. URLs are a compact way to manage an image portfolio but they carry the risk that the picture at the other end of that link might be changed or simply deleted, and you won’t know until someone questions it. Otherwise you’ll need to point directly to stored files which can easily get unwieldy.
They’re high maintenance. Unless your business keeps a nice clean image repository, creating quality up-to-date imagery is challenging. Consistent sizing and resolution is a substantial extra layer of effort. And in fairness to those sales reps, you can bet a good majority of them hate having their mug shot plastered on reports.
Of course, if images are a relevant facet of the report, e.g. reports involving damage incidents, then it’s great that the functionality exists and we’d never be dismissive of that genuine need.
Outside of those legitimate uses however, imagery is basically an amusement that drains development and ongoing operational resources. Steer clear!
We specialise in data visualisation at White Box
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