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.
We’ve focussed a lot through the year on making a dashboard sharp through good planning, understanding business requirements, and best design practice. However, the most beautiful and impactful dashboard ever will be consigned to the scrap heap of history if users label it that one dreaded thing – slow.
As a developer it’s a common pitfall. Quite often the first pass of a dashboard is run on a sample of data, perhaps to prove out some ideas or because the full dataset isn’t yet available. Then there’s that hard to crack coding on some measure, but after countless trials and growing complexity it finally works against a small group of test cases.
In either case, if the build gets too far advanced with no knowledge of how it will go against a full dataset there’s a big risk of disappointment around delivery time. Report optimisation should be kept in mind as much as possible to mitigate the delays of revision, and sometimes a complete restructuring of the approach.
To that end, here’s a quick selection of basics to help a dashboard soar:
Understand the most efficient methods for making data connections, and optimise your data transformation. Consider the degree of pre-done aggregation, consolidation and exclusion that will enable a balance of performance, flexibility and granularity of your end product.
If you’re connecting to an established data warehouse, work with the administrator to confirm best practice is being deployed. A well-organised and indexed database can significantly reduce query times.
Stay abreast of function enhancements amongst your visualisation tools coding languages, so you can take advantage of new optimised commands that potentially replace a collection of old ones, as well as understanding what substitutable functions consume more resources.
We specialise in data visualisation at White Box
We can illuminate your data so that you can make the right, unbiased decisions for your organisation.
As your partner in data visualisation - Power BI, Tableau, Qlik, Looker and more - we’ll help you see the full potential of your data and maximise your business success through advanced and innovative solutions that make all the difference.
Get in touch today for your free data strategy consultation.
