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.
(And drilling…)
Filters are one of the most prominent features of an interactive dashboard, offering the flexibility to see a wide variety of cuts of business data. These might be by way of explicit dropdown lists, in-chart selection, drill-through and more. Users can rapidly focus, compare, and exclude data to suit their analysis and decision-making requirements.
As a report developer it’s tempting to offer up as much filtering capability as possible, however as we’ve so often seen there’s a discipline to this. Consider these traits for the best user experience:
Accurate: Be sure that when you choose a certain filter the results stack up. Don’t wait for a user to tell you the annual revenue looks good but when they select September only it increases (or just as bad, everything disappears). Cross-validate your drill-throughs as well, so the more granular display matches up to the main report.
Robust: Don’t rest on just a few basic selections. Check that outputs stand up to all manner of filtering, such as multi-selects, combinations, outliers, etc.
Relevant: Users routinely want to see row-level data relating to a data point, and drill-throughs do this job perfectly. It pays though not to make it a data dump; consider the most relevant granularity and content or users will go back to where they started and export everything to Excel.
Restrained: More filters might mean more flexibility, however ultimately it leads to clutter and confusion. For in-display filters stick to a handful of key ones, aim for no more than six.
Apparent: As experts we know what’s on offer but on handover to users it’s not always obvious. Provide reasonable guidance by way of labels, tooltips (more on that in a future article), and smart layout as to what filtering is available, and be ready to offer a quick training session to kickstart things.
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.
