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.
It might not seem important to some, but dashboard aesthetics are effective in driving user engagement and trust. After all, if the look and feel is sloppy, who says the coding behind it isn’t as well?
Design isn’t everyone’s strong point of course, and for a truly polished product a dashboard might need input from your team’s most creative mind.
However, before we worry about that there are a range of basics that any developer should pay attention to in order to deliver a baseline professional result. Here are some easy wins:
Appropriate font styling
Visualisation tools tend to err on the large side, which is a good way to start so that overcrowding is discouraged; reduction can add refinement depending on the use case. Be restrained with font colouring so as not to detract from your main palette. And plain fonts tend to work better, particularly with numbers. Overall, be consistent and purposeful.
Neatly aligned objects
It’s normal to drop objects all over the canvas at the start of a build. We don’t necessarily know in advance the optimal sizing and layout for everything, which typically emerges over the journey. At the end though, get it all in order with neat alignment and spacing. All visualisation tools come with built in functionality to make this straightforward.
Good quality logo
It might not affect the output, but a company logo brings a dashboard to life for its users. As a signature part of the dashboard, be sure to use a quality image. Logos are a powerful source of identity, and a blurred or otherwise poor quality image detracts from your product.
Meaningful titles
There’s a temptation to be economical with chart and other titles on a dashboard. Be wary though, a snappy title might mean a lot to the person who built the chart, but nothing to fresh eyes. Make titles meaningful, even if it seems like a mouthful; if detailed description is needed consider options like hover notes or a dedicated exposition link.
Chart axes
They’re an important facet of interpretation, but don’t need to be visually prominent; small, dimmed fonts are fine, and if data labels are being used on the chart itself then the relevant axis can be omitted. Axis titles should also be used sparingly, especially when redundant (e.g. ‘Month’ below an axis with labels ‘Jan-23’, Feb-23’, etc).
Number formatting
A dashboard will have plenty of numeric content, help the viewer by making it easy to take in. Distinguish monetary values with a currency symbol, and 9 times out of 10 omit the cents – nobody needs to know that they spent $1.6 million… and 23 cents. Likewise with decimals, lean towards no decimals or one at most. It’s not to say that extra precision will never be needed, but it should be used with purpose not by default.
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