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.
Tooltips (or hints, screen tips, hover notes, and other clever names given to them by app developers) are a great way to provide bonus information that is surplus to needs upfront. Most visualisation tools will have some minimum tooltip detail by default, which can be switched off or escalated to requirements.
Typical tooltip display would be a handful of additional data points, and can extend to charts and images. They really can be powerful, however if I’ve learned anything from Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility. Overdo them and they become a nightmare, more on that below.
On the positive side, tooltips can:
Allow chart dimensions to be seen where space is insufficient on the primary display.
Provide context for an aggregate metric.
Appease users with an appetite for detail, or whose requirements were de-prioritised.
Use secondary charting for a deeper cut or alternative view of the primary display.
Enhance the user experience with imagery.
The danger to be wary of is having too much of a good thing. If every data point on your dashboard has some kind of tooltip ready to appear, you run the risk of those pop-ups constantly blocking your main display – you won’t be able to see the forest for the trees.
Tooltips can also lag a little, appearing slower than you can navigate around screen. This can sometimes leave you in an apparent vortex of tooltips as you frustratedly try to escape one and inadvertently engage another. By limiting them to purposeful ones only, this can be avoided.
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